


Bright Burning

by ipreferfiction



Series: Reckless, Angry, Empty [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: Knights of the Old Republic (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force Visions (Star Wars), Gen, Human Disaster Revan, Minor Character Death, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Space Battles, Unhappy Ending, War, these two idiots are the poster children for why the jedi have a no attachment rule
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-07
Updated: 2021-01-27
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:47:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 66,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27929254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ipreferfiction/pseuds/ipreferfiction
Summary: Everything ends on Malachor V.But to understand that heat death of the war, you must understand this: it all begins with Revan Adarii, three years earlier, as she turns her back on the High Council on Coruscant and raises an army of Jedi to fight the Mandalorian Wars.She is twenty-one. Within six months, she is recognized as the best strategist of the Republic army. Within a year, she is their Supreme Commander. And by the time three years have passed and she is little more than a legend behind a mask, she has singlehandedly won the war—her Jedi ideals a necessary sacrifice to achieve victory. To crush the Mandalorians.Revan, Alek, Mireya Surik, and the lies they tell themselves as they go to war.
Relationships: Alek | Darth Malak & Revan, Alek | Darth Malak/Female Revan, The Jedi Exile & Revan
Series: Reckless, Angry, Empty [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1668766
Comments: 21
Kudos: 12





	1. Solivagant

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _She doesn’t need to talk. Standing on that balcony, covered head to toe in black and grey and red, with Alek just behind her, her people know what she’s done.  
>  Ketaris has been won for the Republic._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Solivagant (adj): one who wanders alone.

Revan snarls as her sabers strike out. Alek barely manages to dodge her downward swing; their three blades clash in a burst of white and blue, and when they break apart, they are both panting with exertion.

“Something has to give,” Alek taunts, grinning. His teeth are stained scarlet from Revan’s lightsaber hilt, a superficial injury that’s been bleeding steadily for fifteen minutes.

“Oh, I agree. Will you be surrendering now, or shall we draw this out some more?” she spits back, feinting left and throwing a lazy kick at his side. He blocks it easily, but he’s still favoring his right leg from their last battle. A weak point. Good.

Revan forgets one crucial detail, though. Just as she’s been analyzing his every move, he’s been watching hers, and when she directs a flurry of blows towards his injured leg, he lashes out, hits her in the ribs, and lands her on the sparring mats, his lightsaber at her throat.

“Yield,” she chokes out, laughing. He extends a hand and helps her up.

“That’s the third time this week,” Alek muses as they make their way to the edge of the room, where their outer robes and other equipment are piled. Revan glares at him as she shrugs her tunic on.

“Are you saying I’m getting sloppy, Squint?”

He pauses, eyes comically wide and a hand over his heart. “I would never!” he exclaims. “You, Revan, leader of the Revanchists—”

“Force, stop reminding me they call themselves that,” she groans as she coils her long braid back beneath her cowl. “It’s a ridiculous name and you know it.”

Alek shakes his head, grinning fondly, but he never gets the chance to reply; the doors to the sparring room slide open and Mireya Surik appears between them. Revan and Alek both freeze at the expression on her face.

“General, commander, you’re needed in the briefing room. Now.”

“What’s going on?” Alek asks as Revan frantically fastens her belt back into place. Now that she’s not occupied with him, she can feel something tremulous hanging far-off in the Force. Not a disturbance, not yet, but about to be.

Mireya is ashen as she replies, “The Mandalorians hit Ketaris yesterday. Reports indicate death tolls in the thousands already; the capital is in ruins. We’re the only ones in the Oplovis sector, let alone near the planet itself. General, we need you.”

The walk to the briefing room takes six minutes. Revan makes it in two.

Ketaris is another Outer Rim planet, though not the usual backwater world. No, this one is well-developed and populous; control of Ketaris means control of the sector, and that’s the last thing that Revan and her people can afford right now. A holomap of the surrounding area lights up the room—Ketaris a ball of red already, a fleet of red ships in orbit around it.

Revan scans the map with a critical eye, absently tapping her fingers on the table’s edge.

“Are they still on Ketaris?” she asks. Mireya frowns in confusion.

“For the most part, yes. Reports indicate that the Mandalorian forces are concentrated in the capital, with the exception of a few small ships that have been spotted heading out into space. Why?”

“If Ketaris has already been taken, what are they waiting for? Why linger?”

“It’s possible that they knew we’d been called for aid,” Alek offers. “Or at least that a Republic ship was in the area.”

“Hmm.” Revan still thinks that something else is going on, but right now, she needs to focus on retaking the planet.

She raises her head and looks around the room. She knows that none of the people gathered here can see her face behind the mask, but she cannot help the trickle of unease she feels as they turn to look at her.

She shoves it aside, squares her shoulders, and lifts her chin.

“The majority of the forces have gathered here,” she says in her most commanding tone, gesturing to the capital. “So that’s where we’ll concentrate our attacks. A force this size, with one of Cassus Fett’s subordinates leading it—” because of _course_ it’s one of Fett’s generals, because Revan cannot catch a break—”will be ready for an attack. That doesn’t mean they won’t be vulnerable. It just means our strategy has to change.”

Six hours’ passage finds Revan climbing into a landing shuttle while her troops deploy around her. Alek stands at her left, holding tight to a bar above the doors, while Mireya clings to a support pole a few feet closer to the center of the ship. Other Jedi eagerly fill the remaining shuttles in pairs or trios, their presence supplemented by the men and women of the Republic military.

The doors of Revan’s shuttle slide shut, plunging the people within into darkness. She checks her wrist comm for the third time since they began to load the shuttles, then opens a channel to the rest of the ships.

“Soldiers! This is not our first battle, nor will it be our last. We will face the Mandalorians again before this war is over. But today, more than our lives stand at stake. The Mandalorian forces have taken Ketaris. If we do not stop them, they will take the sector. They will walk over our corpses to do it.

“So today we fight. We draw our lightsabers, our blasters, our rifles. We take a stand on a planet that few of us have ever seen before not because we love it, but because we are fighting for every inch of ground the Mandalorians have ever taken, every body we have buried. We fight for the Republic. We fight for our freedom.

“So fight.

“Revan out.”

When she closes the comm channel and lowers her wrist, Alek is watching her with a faint smile.

“What?” she asks defensively.

“You’re good at that,” he answers lightly. “Good at speeches. At inspiring all of them, not just the Revanchists.”

“It’s not the Revanchists you need to inspire,” Mireya pipes up. Revan can barely see the top of her blonde head over the shoulders of the men and women between them. “It’s the people who aren’t following you because you’re a Jedi. The ones who serve under you because you’re a general and it’s their duty. And Commander Alek is right; you inspire them, too.” The girl is grinning at Revan through the jostling bodies between them, and Revan cannot help but smile back, though none of them can see it.

“Alright. We hit the planet in ten. You all have your orders,” she says, turning her attention to the Jedi and other soldiers in the ship. “We make for the capital and the Mandalorian camp.”

“Understood, general,” they chorus.

“Alek, Mireya, you’re with me. The moment the ship hits the ground, we’re out. Now let’s go hunt some Mando’ade.”

The Mandalorians didn’t have the ships for a blockade. That proves to be their first mistake. Revan’s forces make it to Ketaris’ surface, and from there, they hit the capital in a quick one-two strike that takes out the Mandalorians’ defenses by nightfall. They make camp on the city’s outskirts, taking up positions in bombed-out buildings that give them lines of sight straight to the center of the capital. Revan knows that’s where the Mandalorians are; she can see their tiny figures flitting around the spire that juts into the sky there, their jetpacks leaving trails in the smoking sky.

Alek finds her standing atop their makeshift base as the blood-colored sun sinks beneath the horizon.

“Aren’t you scheduled to lead the frontal assault tomorrow?” he asks her as if he wasn’t there when she made the lists.

“I—something about this doesn’t sit right with me, Squint,” she murmurs. Her mask rests on the wall beside her, and she taps it with absent fingers as she fixes her gaze back on the skyline. “I don’t like this.”

Alek shoots her a look. Revan has feelings, and Revan has Feelings; he’s trying to ascertain which this is.

 _It’s both,_ she thinks. The bond between them hums.

By the time daylight begins to filter over their camp, Revan is prepared to fight. She barely slept all night, but as she triple-checks her combat equipment, her limbs are buzzing with energy. Ketaris is a high-stakes prize; if they turn this to a victory, their foothold will be enormous—and it will make the Mandalorians think twice about going up against them.

Picking out their weak points is less of a problem than Revan thought it might be. The Mandalorians have clustered around the citadel, and though they are heavily fortified and armed with massive cannons, she instantly recognizes what they’ve done. Just like the skeleton crew of ships in Ketaris’ orbit, down on the surface, they don’t have half the numbers they should. Large groups have clustered around the guns, and more have been set up in the streets leading to the citadel, but where the main force should be waiting, Revan can only catch glimpses of scattered figures. 

And so, when her forces go to break themselves against the Mandalorians down on the ground, while Mireya and most of the Jedi shore up the Republic, Revan takes Alek and a strike team and disappears into the streets.

Revan doesn’t need a force of Republic soldiers to retake the citadel. She has four Jedi at her back. One by one, they follow her lead, leaping from building to building and sticking to the shadows until they reach the citadel’s base, and then they begin to climb.

 _The thing about Jedi_ , Revan thinks as she carefully unscrews an air vent and watches the others climb their grappling lines behind her, _is that they’re a lot harder to keep out than Republic soldiers._

And from the vent, it’s a straight shot to the citadel’s heart, where Fett’s general has holed up with his most elite guards. _That_ particular journey ends with a scattered trail of beskar-clad corpses behind them and one of Revan’s strike team left behind with a field medkit to nurse a blaster bolt to the gut, but they finally manage to reach the general’s headquarters.

He has a pair of guards on every door, another four around his desk. Awfully paranoid, for a man who seemed certain enough in his victory to all but abandon the planet he’d just seized.

At the back of her skull, the Force hums its discordance. Alek shoots her a concerned look.

 _I’m fine,_ she says into their bond. He doesn’t look like he believes her.

“Hello, general,” she says with all the bravado she isn’t feeling, stepping from the shadowed hall. She can feel Alek bright in the Force behind her; he’s drawn his lightsaber. The two others flank them, framing the doorway.

The still-nameless general is not as surprised as he should be.

“Jedi,” he sneers, standing in a mockery of a greeting. “Welcome to Ketaris.”

“Revan.” She glances around the room, mustering an unimpressed look. “My name. And I really can’t say I like what you’ve done. In fact, I think I’m going to have to ask you to leave now.”

The general bares his teeth and growls.

“What makes you think I’m giving up this citadel, let alone this planet?” he asks derisively, sliding his previously-discarded helmet over his head. “I took it. By rights, it’s mine.”

“Because,” Revan replies, voice falsely light, “my forces just destroyed those lovely cannons of yours.”

Right on cue, a massive boom rattles through the citadel, sending datapads and ornaments tumbling from their previous resting places and shaking the general more than physically. He thought himself untouchable; he doesn’t like being proved wrong.

He isn’t like the warlords or pompous senate criminals who used to speak so bravely but quailed at the end of a padawan’s lightsaber. In that, Revan will grant him some measure of respect. He motions to his men and raises his blaster against them; Revan narrows her eyes and reaches for the lightsabers hanging from her belt.

The _hiss-crack_ of three blades igniting simultaneously bolster Revan as she stalks forward. The Mandalorians here are strong, stronger even than the guards she killed in the halls, but her Jedi are stronger. One at her back, one at each side, she just keeps moving forward as beskar-clad bodies hit the ground.

 _Thud._ A footstep, and the general fires. Her sabers are ignited and deflecting it in an instant.

 _Thud._ A pair of Mandalorians are suddenly relieved of their heads, another footstep, and Revan sets her face and _snarls_.

The general gives up on his blaster and sends a jet of flames shooting towards her, flicking a sharp-edged knife in the same direction. The flame just barely singes the edge of her robe as she rolls; the knife finds its ends on the rippling edges of her lightsabers.

She isn’t expecting the punch that comes flying towards her face. That one is harder to block; despite his age, the commander knows what he’s doing, knows how to counter her force-imbued strikes. Revan has a sneaking suspicion that most of Fett’s top commanders, if not the majority of the Mandalorians, have trained to fight Jedi specifically.

It doesn’t help that her lightsabers keep skating off his beskar armor. She needs to find the weak points—neck, sides, or armpits—before he gets in a good hit on her comparatively unprotected torso.

The edge of a vibroblade scrapes across her mask, and she stops thinking in favor of trying to _not die._

The general has decades of combat experience under his belt, decades that Revan can’t match, but no one is perfect, especially against a Jedi. Soon enough, he slips up; for just a moment, his arm lifts too high as he brings a blow down on Revan’s head. As she lifts one lightsaber up to block his downward swing, the other stutters and goes out.

The sound of reignition is muffled as Revan presses the emitter to the pit of his arm and presses the igniter.

And—

The battle freezes as the general stops—

Revan can almost pretend she sees his widening eyes even behind the darkly mirrored window of his helmet, as she pulls the burning blue blade from within his chest. Very, very faintly, she catches whispered snatches of Mando’a from deep within his mask.

She stands. He falls to his knees, then fully to the floor, the last of them to fall.

Revan is glad for the blank surface of her mask as she turns away from his corpse to face her Jedi.

“Ketaris is ours,” she says softly, and walks to the citadel’s balcony.

She had been bluffing when she told the now-dead general that her people had taken out his guns. Mireya and the rest had their orders, but Mandalorians are difficult enemies; she is pleasantly surprised to see more than half the installments are up in smoke, and the pockets of fighting around the rest bode ill for the few remaining Mandalorians.

She doesn’t need to talk. Standing on that balcony, covered head to toe in black and grey and red, with Alek just behind her, her people know what she’s done.

Ketaris has been won for the Republic.

Starships are _loud._ People expect the durasteel halls and smooth floors to be nearly soundless once the crew is in bed and asleep, but Revan’s flagship is humming beneath her boots as she moves to stand before the window looking into her quarters. They’re hovering over Ketaris as they refuel; before dawn, they’ll be back in hyperspace going wherever the Republic needs them next. Apparently, she has a scheduled holocoll with High Command in a few hours, as her datapad helpfully reminds her.

She tosses it aside, toes off her boots, and slips cross-legged to the ground. Her lightsabers, unhooked from their usual places on her belt, rise to hover beside her head as she stares into the abyss of space.

Lightyears away, some bright spot flickers and dies. Revan holds that picture in her mind and lets her eyes flutter shut.

The world narrows to her mind and the twin kyber crystals and the glowing thread connecting her to Alek, even as far away as he is (across the ship, overseeing the Jedi as they fight off their extra energy; she can feel their distant signatures as her mind expands). Every soul aboard the ship, the shuttles flashing across the sky and traversing the space between here and Ketaris’ far-off dusty surface. The planet itself, flickering and glowing beneath her.

She exhales, presses her palms to the faintly vibrating metal floor, and settles her mind into the living Force.

And if even meditation fails to quiet her, if Ketaris’ sun breaking over the planet’s surface finds her unsettled and unnerved, well.

Behind her mask, who can tell?


	2. Sonder

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Revan refuses to lose this planet. She cannot lose this planet. But she has no way to win the city._  
>  Turn your loss into a victory, _says some long-ago lesson learned on the hard floors of an enclave she hasn’t seen in almost a year._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sonder (n): The profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passed in the street, has a life as complex as one's own, which they are constantly living despite one's personal lack of awareness of it.

Jedi do not hate anyone. They are sworn to it.

But Revan is really, really beginning to loathe Cassus Fett. He’s been toying with her since Ketaris or earlier—Ketaris, as it turns out, was his way of getting her measure, seeing the sort of commander she was. According to reports, he’s done it to all the Republic’s best generals, along with some of their worst. And when his fleet attacks, his tactics change to suit the ones he’s tested.

Revan doesn’t like being tested, and she doesn’t like being toyed with. And when she catches Fett…

Oh, she’s going to have a fun time proving him wrong.

By the time her shuttles hit the surface of Lantillies—most of the way to becoming a city-planet like Taris or Coruscant—her people are raring for a fight. The other Jedi have picked up on her itch to catch Fett, and what the Jedi feel eventually passes to the rest of the forces. She’s given her speeches, prepped her army, made sure they know what they’re facing. Her people are  _ good, _ though. She’s spent the past several months training them to be the best that the Republic has to offer. She knows she’s done her jobs when they come home heroes.

She knows she’s done her job when her forces come home at all, when so many others die in the field.

“General! Commander!” barks their pilot, Lieutenant Passik, a red-skinned twi’lek with golden flecks along her heavy lekku. “Landing imminent. Hold on; it’s a hard one.”

Revan grips a handle beside her head and braces herself; the shuttle hits the ground with a series of grinding thumps that really can’t be healthy for the ship. Passik grits her pointed teeth and does her best to steer them in the correct direction as empty, shelled-out buildings flash by on either side. Finally, they come to a screeching halt, probably trailing smoke behind them. Revan might be the best strategist in the army, but her budget for ships and shuttles does tend to exceed the norm.

“Welcome to Lantillies,” Passik says sardonically as she clambers out of her flight harness. “I hear it’s lovely when the Mandalorians aren’t sacking it.”

Revan snorts; her mask hides the grin that flashes across her face, but she sees its mirror on Alek’s face.

_ Well, we’d better stop that sacking, shouldn’t we? _ His voice is light with amusement even in her mind.

_ Why, Alek, you read my mind. _

The grin he flashes her is sharp and vicious, all white teeth and pointed canines.

“Then let’s get started,” he says, stepping from the shuttle. Dust plumes beneath his feet as he strides into the open. “Come on,  _ general. _ The planet is waiting for us.”

Mireya is waiting for them, having touched down in one of the earlier shuttles. Her hair is tied back, and she looks serious, despite the streak of dust across her cheek.

“The Mandalorian forces have entrenched themselves here and here,” she says tersely as they approach, gesturing to two places on the holomap unfolded before her. “According to reports, the majority of their forces are still there, though they’re likely preparing to launch a full assault into Razari City tomorrow.”

Revan nods, eyeing the map. She knows that they can’t see the flicker of her eyes behind her mask as she scans it; the longer she takes, the more she senses their unease creeping into the Force

Finally, she straightens.

“Our shuttles have mirrored theirs,” she declares, pointing out their positions. “We’ve got defensive infrastructure built up along this wall—” she gestures and continues, “and the majority of our forces will spread out along the southern wall. We attack as soon as they make a move. For now, everyone, get some rest,” she commands. “I want you ready for a fight whenever the order goes out—and that means  _ no moonshine _ , Wolf Squad.” The squad in question rolls their eyes; they’re some of her best, wild cards that have won her more than one skirmish, but their leader carries around a jar of alcohol strong enough to strip paint, and they all like it a bit too much.

Revan knows what Cassus Fett is going to do after the sun goes down. She’s seen enough burning buildings and ransacked towns to know that he’ll strike at night. It’s a favorite tactic of his, one she’s fully prepared to face.

And indeed, when the planet’s distant sun dips below the horizon, Revan’s scouts begin to report increased activity from Cassus Fett’s encampment. Mireya receives the reports alongside her; the girl’s mind is sharp, despite her young age, and Revan wants to see what she’ll do with the information she has.

Just over an hour after the sun’s last light disappears, the Mandalorians start to move. At first, it’s only pairs or trios creeping along side streets into the city. Then whole squads begin to move out of their camp, a beskar wall intent on crushing anything in its path. Somewhere among them is Cassus Fett.

Revan wonders if he thinks about the generals he faces across the battlefield in moments like these, if he’s looking out towards her camps and considering how she might be preparing her troops. In moments like these, with so many moving parts all circling her like planets in orbit, Revan feels more kinship with her enemy commanders than with her people.

“Revan. It’s time to head out.”

With  _ most _ of her people, that is. Alek knows the weight of command; she didn’t name him her second simply because he was her oldest friend.

She nods, still looking out through the fractured edges of Razari into its darkened interior. Somewhere inside, a few civilians likely still sleep within their beds. Even farther out, the Mandalorians have started their assault; the faint boom of cannonfire rattles windows and sends far-off plumes of dust into the sky, glowing with flickering firelight and the residue of explosions.

One hand falls to her belt, gloved fingers resting on the familiar edges of her oldest saber hilt.

“Cassus Fett is going to lose today,” she says to Alek. “And I am going to be there to accept his surrender.”  _ Or to watch him die _ .

The night stretches on and on. While Mireya waits in camp updating reports and sending out strategies to most of their Jedi forces, Revan takes Alek and two squads and hits Razari’s center. She’s off her speeder before it even slides to a halt; she lands on the roof of a nearby building and watches it go spinning into a pair of Mandalorians who don’t dodge fast enough. Their Force signatures flare and die; Revan ignites her sabers, climbs to her feet, and leaps into open air.

For a moment, she hangs suspended above the open square, nothing around her but endless sky. In the next, she hits the ground, another two Mandalorians dead by her side. She straightens and brushes dust from her mask’s viewing window, makes sure her troops are still standing, and signals their next move.

And so they continue for hours, barely speaking save for barked words and battle cries. In the darkest hour of the night, Revan kills five enemy soldiers with a mine and another four with her lightsabers in a burst of light and motion that leaves the survivors shaken and terrified. Two minutes later, she and her people are gone, leaving behind an empty alley pinging with Mandalorian blaster-fire. She smiles at that.

Her good mood has faded by the time the sun rises once more. Grey dawn light finds her perched on an overturned hovercraft, legs stretched out as she nurses a blaster graze to one calf. Alek and the bits of her squad still left alive—about half, far too many casualties—loiter restlessly around the vehicle’s base as she examines the latest reports from her probe droids.

Revan’s forces are losing. Though they outnumber the Mandalorians, though they’ve won against forces this size before, something about the warriors under Cassus Fett’s command makes this battle different. And it  _ must _ be Fett’s presence; no other alternative makes sense.

Revan runs through her dwindling list of options. She doesn’t have the explosives or the ordnance to smoke Fett and his warriors out, and she no longer has the  _ people _ to launch an assault on his camp, if he’s even there anymore. Even with her Jedi, his people are too good, worryingly adept at fighting (and killing) Jedi. Revan spares a glance for the people still fighting beside her.

She won’t risk them. She can’t.

If her forces stay in Razari, her tactical skills won’t matter. Today, tomorrow, or further down the line, they will lose. Most of them will die. If they leave, though, nothing will stop Fett from taking Razari, and using it as a launching point for a full-scale planetary invasion. Lantillies will be lost.

Revan refuses to lose this planet. She  _ cannot _ lose this planet. But she has no way to win the city.

_ Turn your loss into a victory, _ says some long-ago lesson learned on the hard floors of an enclave she hasn’t seen in almost a year.

If she loses the city, the Mandalorians will flood it. Fett will take the chance to sweep it, to regroup, and to turn it into his base of operations. That’s what he likes to do to conquered cities; she knows that from the reports she’s spent hours studying. Razari will be filled with Mandalorians all coming down from a battle high.

The  _ Basilisk _ hangs in Lantillies’ atmosphere, nothing more than a foggy shape from this far down. Three cruisers flank it; all are armed to the teeth. Armed enough for orbital bombardment.

It would wipe Razari off the map. Revan’s victory would be marked by the smoking crater of Lantillies’ capital. But they would  _ win. _

An entire planet over one city.

Revan is willing to pay that price.

Mireya answers her comm on the second ring.

_ “We can’t hold them off for much longer, Revan!”  _ she exclaims, voice fuzzy as she pulls back to yell orders at a nearby soldier.

For a moment, Revan doesn’t speak. She can still go back from this.

“Withdraw all forces from Razari,” she says. Her voice sounds detached even to her own ears. “Evacuate the injured first. Then get on a shuttle and get out.”

Alek’s head jerks around to stare at her open-mouthed.

_ What are you doing? _ She can’t tell if he said it out loud or in her skull, and she doesn’t have time to figure it out; Mireya is staring at her wide-eyed, face open and angry.

_ “What? You can’t be serious—people will die! Civilians will die if we leave!” _

“I said  _ withdraw,” _ she snaps. Her tone leaves no room for argument.

The orders reach her forces in five minutes. From the center of the city, she watches as shuttle after shuttle flees the surface; by the time she reaches the landing zone, only a few remain. Mireya is waiting next to one of them, arms crossed. Revan can feel her anger and, deeper down, her shock.

“All due respect, Revan, you can’t just do this!” she snaps. Revan brushes past her, reaching out to sense for any straggling troops. Finding none that she can’t see in the camp, she climbs onto the hovering shuttle.

“This is the only way we’re going to win Lantillies, Commander Surik,” she snaps. Overhead, a Mandalorian cannon shatters one of their shuttles into so much debris; Mireya flinches at the sound.

“But—”

“Get on the shuttle. We’re leaving.”

Mireya turns on her heel and stalks off towards another waiting shuttle. Revan shakes her head. Why can’t Mireya see that she doesn’t have a  _ choice? _

The shuttle lifts off. As the doors slide shut, Revan catches her last glimpse of Razari: a wasteland of durasteel and concrete, the Mandalorians swarming it like ants. They’re still shooting at her retreating shuttles; two more go down in a hail of fire, and the pilot flying this one—not Passik, judging by the jerky motions that send her sprawling against the doors more than once—barely manages to dodge some of the more precise fire. Just as they hit the upper atmosphere, a shell finds them, sending the shuttle spiraling off-course; they manage to limp back to the  _ Basilisk, _ but only barely.

“What exactly is your plan here?” Alek demands as Revan stalks towards the bridge. Revan frowns, then remembers he can’t see her face.

“Orbital bombardment,” she says simply.  _ Shock _ flares across their bond, followed by something that tastes a little like fear.

“Of Razari.” It isn’t a question.

“Fett is holed up there along with most of his forces. If we hit the city and hit it  _ hard, _ he might not crawl out of this one. Either way, he’ll lose, and we can sweep back in and pick off the rest. Alek, the planet will be ours.”

He doesn’t say anything else, but he doesn’t seem to understand, either; he just steps back and lets her sweep through the doorway onto the bridge, following behind.

Passik is waiting for them, her uniform stained with dust and blood; she nods a greeting as Revan approaches.

“Are they all off the planet?” Revan asks the soldier manning the sensors.

“Affirmative, general,” they reply. “All the shuttles that survived transit have landed in the ship; yours was one of the last. Injured soldiers currently en route to the medbay; the rest are getting cleaned up.”

“Good. Lieutenant Passik, damages.”

“Seven landing shuttles lost; two crashed when we hit the planet, five got hit by the Mandos during evac. Casualty reports haven’t been finalized, but we lost quite a few down on the surface,” she reports, professional as ever now that she’s back on the bridge. Those numbers are worse than Revan hoped, but they could have taken a lot more damage.

Once again, she hesitates. Here, they could flee, take their losses and retreat to space to lick their wounds and regroup.

Revan opens a comm channel to every ship orbiting Lantillies.

“All ships, target these coordinates,” she says, sending them a list of Razari’s biggest targets, all the places she knows the Mandalorians will gather.

“Sir, these are all in Razari,” says one weapons officer timidly. She barely spares him a sideways glance.

“All ships open fire.”

The order is sent, and the order is carried out. Revan has served beside these people for enough months that they trust her judgement.

Razari disappears beneath a cloud of fire and dirt.

And Revan ignores the hesitance she senses from the crew manning the weapons and the trepidation flickering around the officers on the bridge. After all, they have done their duty. They have carried out Revan’s command. In the end, they listened to her, and that is what matters.

And Razari burns below their feet.

_ “General Adarii, congratulations on your victory on Lantillies.”  _ The flickering form of Chancellor Cressa looks pleased, though a few of the admirals around him have less positive expressions.

“I did my duty, Chancellor,” she replies. “Lantillies had to be won for the Republic. I only regret how much devastation was necessary to do it.

_ “Was it necessary?” _ one of the figures sharing the holocall mutters. Revan recognizes him as Admiral Fon Dicas. He was one of the first to lose against Cassus Fett.  _ “A whole city, just gone?” _

Behind her mask, Revan opens her mouth to give the usual responses— _ yes, of course, what choice did I have— _ when Chancellor Cressa speaks up.

_ “What would you have done, admiral? That many Mandalorians, all up against you? General Adarii made a good call choosing to wipe them out. She won us Lantillies, and that gives us access to all their shipping routes, too. This was a major victory for the Republic!” _

The shipping routes. The only reason they sent Revan to defend Lantillies to begin with; it controls a huge portion of shipping in the Outer Rim, now firmly back under the Republic’s thumb. It was a major victory. It will certainly help them in the months to come.

_ It was a victory for the Republic. _ That is what Revan tells herself again and again, as the Supreme Chancellor heaps praise on her head, as all but a few of the officers come around.  _ It was a victory. Lantillies was a victory. _

And yet—

And yet Revan is glad that her army can’t see her face, that the admirals hiding behind Cressa on the holocall have no idea what she looks like. She can divorce herself from the Revan who stood on her ship’s bridge and unleashed hell on the planet below her when she takes off the mask.

She stopped taking it off during sparring sessions after Ketaris. Now, she scarcely takes it off during daylight hours. She eats alone or with Alek and Mireya (not that she’s actually seen Mireya in person since Razari; the padawan has been present at their meetings in holo-image only, and Revan isn’t sure that she’s forgiven her for the bombardment); she doubts that more than a handful of people actually know what she looks like.

Force, she’s tired. Alone in her quarters, the mask slips from her fingers and hits her bed, soundless in its fall. Bare-faced, open to the sky, Revan curls her fingers into fists and stifles a noise crawling from her throat, either a scream or a sob.

Lantillies was a victory. Then why doesn’t it feel like she won? Why does she hear Cassus Fett’s laughter when she stops moving long enough for her mind to catch up with her?

She knows what the numbers say. Pulling out her forces saved their lives. Bombing Razari killed hundreds of Fett’s followers, and the rest limped back to the Mandalorian fleet to nurse their injuries and their grudge against her. Comparatively, bombing a city almost completely empty of civilians and full of enemy soldiers was the right call when a whole planet was at stake.

The Chancellor and half the Senate have hailed her a master tactician. She can live with their praise. She  _ has _ to be able to live with it. Lantillies  _ has _ to be a victory.

Because if it isn’t, then Revan was wrong. And Revan can’t be wrong about what she did. If she is, then she made that call for nothing. She bombed a city into dust for no reason save her pride.

No. Lantillies is a victory.

Revan isn’t wrong.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lieutenant Passik is trans. This isn't plot relevant at all but she's trans.  
> Writing Revan's slow fall is very fun because a few symbols wax and wane in importance throughout her journey. She really is an absolutely fascinating character to write, especially later in the wars, when she's become more ruthless. This is her first big sacrifice, and she doesn't quite know what to think about it.  
> Other than that, the usual: enjoy the chapter and feel free to leave comments; they're very welcome, no matter the length. I love hearing from readers.


	3. Exulansis

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _She’ll have to return soon enough. She’s just been named Supreme Commander, and she’s sure the Chancellor will want to speak to her before the_ Basilisk _and her fleet are off to their next battle. At some point, she must face the music. But just this once, she wants to be selfish. She wants to get to live without a planet or a star system hanging over her head._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Exulansis (n): the tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it.

Sometimes Revan wishes she never left Dantooine and the Council there. On nights like these, when nightmares wrack her brain, when it’s all she can do to contain her fear and pain and keep them from spilling over the bond into Alek’s head, she can’t help but wish for the days when she could rest easy knowing her place.

When she wouldn’t have to make sacrifices like a planet’s capital in order to win a battle.

Force, she’s not thinking about that, not when she just watched the Mandalorians’ war droids (droids that share the name of her flagship) fall like blackened hailstones onto cities and forests and plains, glowing red-hot and with death on their heels. Duro will take years, if not decades, to recover from that destruction. She defeated them—halted their so-called “Mandalorian Triumph” then and there in the muddy ground, rain pouring down around her as her ships destroyed what little of their fleet that didn’t flee—but the damage they’d wrought was astronomical.

(The commander Revan captured had been trained by Mandalore the Ultimate himself. It showed in every inch of her fighting style, even in the way her basilisk had dodged Revan’s fighter until superior instincts finally won over and Revan bore it down into the dirt. When she had finally crawled from her burning droid, face a mess of blood, she had grinned at Revan and barked out a few words in Mandalorian— _gar ganar mandokar, sosol ti mhi._ She had gone willingly into custody, although she’d seemed awfully certain that she wasn’t going to _stay_ a prisoner of the Republic. So toppled another game piece, and Revan was no closer to the Mandalore than before.)

Revan turns away from her room’s window and gives up on meditation. She isn’t going to quiet her mind right now; every time she closes her eyes, she sees Duro and its frightened citizens or the towers of Razari falling to pieces beneath her ship’s fire.

She climbs to her feet and reaches out a hand; her mask starts to rattle in its place beside the door, finally flying across the room to land in her outstretched palm. Calling for it is different than calling for her lightsabers; the mask isn’t alive in the way her kyber crystals are, and so it always feels a little hollow when she touches it with the Force.

She tucks the trailing end of her braid back into her inner hood and pulls its edges snug against her face, then slides the mask back into place. With that and her cloak on, dressed in her usual robes, not an inch of her skin shows. She has once again become Revan the general, who doesn’t flinch at cannonfire, who wins them victories in battles that would send others running.

When she emerges from her room and makes her way down to the lower decks, she finds Mireya waiting for her in the halls. Mireya, newly seventeen, is even more shaken after Duro than Revan herself; she’s spent most of her nights since then meditating on the viewing deck or sparring until she’s shaking too hard to continue. But she’s stronger, too, than she once was. After Lantillies, after _Razari,_ she didn’t understand how Revan could have made that call. Now that she’s seen what the Mandalorians have done to a planet when given the chance, Revan thinks she does.

“The supply officers have their list of what we need to requisition,” she informs Revan as they walk. “I’ve been down in the medbay, too, and it looks like all our injured troops are making enough of a recovery that we shouldn’t have to drop them anywhere. Oh, and a new set of orders came through on the main holoterminal. We were waiting to view them ‘til you showed up.”

“Send the lists to my datapad; I’ll look them over this afternoon. Let’s go see where we’re being ordered next.”

The briefing room is mostly empty when Revan and Mireya finally arrive. Passik stands off to one side, one lek wrapped around her neck and a cup of caf in hand, while Alek leans up against the holoterminal scanning something on his datapad. Evidently, it isn’t that important; he sets it to the side as Revan approaches, already queuing up their orders.

 _The Chancellor sent them through this morning,_ he tells her before she can even ask. 

_Did you look at them yet?_

“No, we were waiting for you,” he replies absently, this time out loud. Mireya glances between the pair of them, evidently unimpressed, and Passik rolls her eyes; she’s used to their strange methods of communication.

Finally, the holoterminal flares to life. Supreme Chancellor Cressa, by now a familiar guest, flickers into place in the table’s center, his usual expression of geniality firmly in place.

 _“General Adarii. I understand you recently received orders to join a skirmish out in Wild Space. I’m afraid I’m going to have to belay those orders. You, your crew, and all the ships under the_ Basilisk’s _command are hereby ordered to return to Coruscant to receive new ones. I ask that you contact my office regarding details of our next meeting as soon as possible. Rest assured, you aren’t going to be disciplined for anything. Quite the opposite, actually._

_“In any regards, try not to stop anywhere on the way back. The sooner I get to speak to you, the better. Cressa out.”_

Revan smiles, though no one but Alek can tell.

Coruscant. They’re finally going back.

A figure cloaked in darkness stands on the bridge of a starship—the bridge of _her_ starship, the familiar durasteel walls of the _Basilisk_ a steady comfort in the strange, shuddering sea of the Force around her. She can’t see their face, she _needs to see their face_ —she knows with certainty that she should know who it is, but she doesn’t.

And green light flashes across the sky, lighting up everything but that figure bleeding darkness into the air. Something takes hold in the Force; all she feels is pain, so much _pain_ , pain and darkness and death like she has never felt before.

Faintly, someone is screaming. And the figure on the _Basilisk’s_ bridge just stands there, silent and steady, watching as a planet shatters.

_REVAN._

She knows that voice. She shouldn’t, but she does—knows it from long ago, from Dantooine, from darkness—

_REVAN._

_No,_ she whispers, but she can’t open her mouth; she casts it out into the Force instead, tries so hard to break this thing’s hold on her, tries to stop staring at that immobile shadow hard as durasteel who just _watches_ as a planet dies.

_YOU CANNOT RUN._

“Revan!”

She jerks up, lightsabers ignited and crossed at her attacker’s throat—only to find that it’s Alek, his hand firm on her shoulder.

She slowly relaxes her grip on the hilts of her lightsabers and lets the glowing blades disappear. Once again, her room is bathed in darkness, lit only by the faint glow of Coruscant far below the _Basilisk._ For half a second, she wishes that, too, was gone; her face is full of naked fear, and she doesn’t like how easily Alek can read it.

But even if she had her mask, ridiculous as it would be to sleep in it, it wouldn’t help her with the weight of Alek’s gaze heavy on her face. He knows she’s not alright. He always does.

“My shields dropped,” she mutters. “Sorry.”

“Your—your shields? Revan, I don’t care about your _shields_ ,” he says. “You look like you’re about to fall apart. What’s going on?”

She feels a glimmer of concern through their bond and sighs.

“It was a nightmare, nothing more. I’m fine. Really.”

_I don’t believe you._

She glares. He’s retreated a few feet back, giving her the space to breathe, which means that she can read his body language all too clearly. Arms crossed, eyebrows raised, he _really_ isn’t going to let this go.

 _I’m fine,_ she insists, putting more than a little force into the words. “Really,” she continues out loud. “It was a nightmare. I’m just a little unsettled.”

Alek shakes his head but doesn’t press.

“Just… be careful, okay?” he says, pausing in the doorway of her quarters as he turns to go. He is reticent to leave her here; she can sense that much, at least.

She musters as much bravado as she can and grins.

“Don’t worry about me, Alek. I can take care of myself.”

He makes a noncommittal noise and steps out of her quarters. The door slides shut, but beyond the durasteel, the bright edges of their bond flickers with emotion.

Alek is right to be worried. Whatever Revan saw in that already-fading nightmare, it shook her.

When she eventually rolls out of bed and joins the others, Mireya tells her that her Force signature feels discordant. Even now, hours later, she cannot shake the flashes of green light and the voice that echoed through her bones.

She is incredibly glad for the mask that hides her face when she, Alek, and Mireya board a shuttle bound for the Senate tower and the Supreme Chancellor’s office. She isn’t entirely sure she could face Tol Cressa bare-faced when Duro is still flashing behind her eyes. He greets them as cheerfully as always, of course, and congratulates Revan on her past few victories, but he doesn’t understand. How could he? He runs the Republic’s politics, but he leaves military matters to others.

Cressa and his protocol droid don’t lead them back to his office after they meet Revan and the other at the door, however. Instead, Revan suddenly finds herself in one of the Senate tower’s many auditoriums. It’s filled with people, humans and a hundred other species, most of them wearing decorated military uniforms.

“I couldn’t promote you in private, General Adarii,” he says by way of an apology for the surprise. “You and your friends do need _some_ public recognition. And, well, better to do it now than for no one to know your name when you keep laying victories at our feet.”

Cressa ushers them onto the podium laid out at the front of the room, gesturing subtly for them to stand arrayed behind him. He turns to the crowd while Revan, hidden safely behind the mask, tries to regain her footing. She was prepared to meet the Chancellor and some of his more trusted officials, not… this. She doesn’t even recognize most of the people in the room. 

“For their actions on Duro, we are gathered to recognize these three Republic officers,” Cressa begins, spreading his arms wide. Revan rolls her eyes behind her mask.

 _Behave,_ Alek warns.

Revan projects a very clear image of her elbowing his side.

“First, Commander Mireya Surik, Jedi padawan. For her command on Duro and her actions in liberating its people, I confer upon her the rank of general.”

Mireya beams. Most of her enthusiasm is genuine, though Revan still senses a thread of dark worry coiling around her. Having to go among Duro’s citizens, fight Mandalorians on the ground while frightened civilians clung to each other, it all took its toll on her.

“Thank you, Supreme Chancellor,” Mireya says. “It’s an honor to serve the Republic.”

“Commander Alek Squinquargesimus, Jedi knight,” Cressa announces next.

 _I’m changing my name the minute we’re out of this war,_ Alek thinks grimly in her direction. She snorts, sound muffled by the mask.

_To what, Squint?_

_Just about anything._

“—actions on Duro—“ Cressa is still talking— “in helping break the Mandalorians’ hold and drive off their fleet, I am proud to grant him the rank of general.”

“Thank you, Supreme Chancellor. I am honored by your regard,” Alek answers, perfectly composed and completely straight-faced.

 _Congratulations, General Squinquargesimus,_ Revan says gleefully, pushing a great deal of amusement across their bond.

Alek has a very good sabacc face. He doesn’t do more than blink as he shoves a sensation that’s little more than _rolled eyes elbow in the side_ back at her.

_Oh, shut up._

The Supreme Chancellor finally turns to her.

“And General Revan Adarii, Jedi knight,” he finishes. “For her actions on Duro, her command of the Republic fleet in driving off the Mandalorians, and her courageous acts in battle; for her strategic command and tactical brilliance; and for her ability to lead, I am only too happy to grant her the rank of Supreme Commander of the Republic Military.”

Revan had known he was going to give her a higher rank. She had been expecting High Commander, maybe influence over a few sectors’ worth of ships and troops.

The entire Republic Military now lays at her disposal.

“Thank you, Supreme Chancellor, for your consideration,” she says at last. “I am honored by your trust in me. I will command the military to the best of my ability for however long I hold this post.”

The Supreme Chancellor nods, though something in his smile reads a little more false than it was just a moment ago.

“Then congratulations are in order, for these three and for all others who serve!” he announces cheerfully, turning to face the crowd again. The room erupts in cheers; Revan catches flashes of pride, of warmth, of joy from the crowds below.

“Congratulations, Supreme Commander,” Alek murmurs as she steps back to take her place beside him.

“Congratulations to you too, general. You deserve it. Both of you.”

By the time Cressa has finished talking—luckily, he never asked her to make a speech—she is itching to be back on the _Basilisk_. She hates all this pompous pageantry, the endless talking never backed up by action. Half these men haven’t seen battle for months. She barely sees the end of it, jerked around from one system to another wherever they need her. She can’t remember the last time she spent a day out of hyperspace outside of meetings or battles or supply requisitions.

She takes the earliest available opportunity and ducks out of the celebration. She leaves the others there; let them have their fun. They deserve it.

Revan is going to make the most of her little remaining time on Coruscant.

It’s as dark as it ever gets on Coruscant when she slips out onto one of the Senate tower’s many balconies. Speeders whizz by in traffic patterns stories deep both above and below her, and neon signs hang suspended in midair as far as she can see. It reminds her a little of stories she’s heard of Nar Shaddaa, though with less criminal activity.

Revan glances behind her. No one has seen her subtle exit, and she doubts they’ll miss her. Talking to a flat mask seems to unsettle them somehow, as if they aren’t sure that a person really hides behind it. So they cheer her victories and celebrate her triumphs, but they all prefer her in the field, far away from the pristine floors of the Senate.

She tips her face skyward. The black window of the mask dulls Coruscant’s vibrant colors and bright lights and it suddenly hits her that she hasn’t viewed it from down here without that mask since she left for Cathar all those months ago.

She wants to see it. She wants to feel the wind of passing speeders and the whisper of night air she can only sense on the tallest towers.

For the first time in almost a year, Revan pulls down the hood of her cloak and slides the mask off her face in open air. She jumps onto the balcony’s railing with a soft motion and hooks the mask on her belt without turning her gaze from the ever-shifting silhouette of Coruscant. The lights, the smell of a hundred districts of intergalactic food, the sheer overwhelming _presence_ of all the trillions of people on the planet—she stretches out her senses and sinks into it, pulling down her inner hood and letting the wind ruffle her hair and send the end of her braid spinning.

She slides to a seat, balanced on the balcony’s wide rail, and lets her legs hang over its edge like she’s a padawan on the roof of the Jedi Enclave back on Dantooine. She leans out over the edge and peers down into the fading depths of the city, a drop of hundreds of levels that makes her head spin. Her braid, loosed from its usual place tucked at the back of her skull, tumbles down over her shoulder to hang over the void. It seems blacker here in open air than it ever looks when she’s hiding it beneath two layers of fabric; something about this night has sunken into her chest and _changed_ her, has shifted the way she is viewing this city in the moments she spends here.

By morning, of course, when she’s back aboard the _Basilisk_ and looking out at the world from behind a beskar shield, this trembling feeling in her chest will be nothing more than a fading memory. But here and now, cold night air creeping in beneath her dark robes, it is _everything._

She inhales a shaky lungful of crisp air. Up this high, she can’t taste the faint tang of soot and smog, only what is emanating from the Senate tower behind her. The sweet night air fills her chest and invigorates her tired limbs; slowly, she feels the strength that the evening sapped from her limbs returning.

A speeder honks far below her; several blocks over and a few levels down, she can hear shouting and breaking glass. Something in Coruscant’s depths howls. And Revan on her railing leans forward and lets herself hang out over the edge, just staring down, letting her eyes remember what the world looks like without a shield between them and it.

She is one person among trillions down here, just another face staring out at the skyline. The Force is peaceful here, swirling with so many different emotions that Revan is lost in the ripples, giddy in the sensation of a planet so _alive_ around her.

Perhaps it is because she’s so lost in the heady feeling of so much energy that she barely catches the Force signature approaching until her outstretched mind flutters against someone else’s and she jerks around, reaching for her mask, before she feels a whisper of fondness that isn’t hers and Alek appears in the balcony’s archway.

“I think Cressa is looking for you,” he says, coming to stand beside her, leaning his forearms against the railing.

 _Let him. I’m not going back in._ She doesn’t feel like speaking out loud, not when she’s still caught up in Coruscant. He doesn’t answer that, though she knows he understands.

“How long has it been since you just stopped and looked around you? Since either of us did?” he murmurs. When Revan glances sideways at him, his eyes are fixed on the distant skyline, a thousand glowing shapes reflected in them. Out here, time is liminal; Revan feels nothing but peace and contentment.

She closes her eyes, concentrates on the cool stone pressing against her palms and legs, and exhales. It’s not quite meditation, but it’s close enough; the steady rise and fall of Alek’s chest beside her, the current of noise that never leaves Coruscant, the flow of so much life, it all surrounds her, until she breathes and the whole planet breathes with her.

She’ll have to return soon enough. She’s just been named Supreme Commander, and she’s sure the Chancellor will want to speak to her before the _Basilisk_ and her fleet are off to their next battle. At some point, she must face the music. But just this once, she wants to be selfish. She wants to get to live without a planet or a star system hanging over her head.

She wants to live, period. Jedi are not forged for war. They train to help, to protect, to only resort to death when absolutely necessary. Revan was raised not as a battlefield commander but as a peacekeeper, no matter how quick to a fight she was and is.

She has her command. She won’t abandon it, not when the Republic needs her strategies and her leadership—she knows she’s the only one who can win them this war. She’s known it since Cathar. She only wishes that she’d never had to fight this war in the first place.

But the Mandalorians invaded, and all those what-ifs are pointless now. She is the Supreme Commander of the Republic Military, and she will do her duty.

She will _always_ do her duty.

Alek manages to drag her back to the celebration—mask firmly in place once more—just as the guests are beginning to trickle out. It’s a perfectly-timed escape; she shakes a few hands, thanks nobles and senators for their support of her campaigns, and exchanges a few brief phrases with Tol Cressa before she finally manages to find Mireya and leave the Senate towers behind. From down on the streets, Coruscant doesn’t look half as beautiful as it did hundreds of feet up, but Revan can forgive that now that she’s on the way back to her ship.

She doubts she’ll be forgetting that memory any time soon. Even now, when she thinks back on it, she feels at peace.

The _Basilisk_ will be in hyperspace for another three days, on the way to head off a small section of the Mandalorian fleet. This gives the military crew time to rest, the Jedi time to train, and Revan time to plan out battle strategies with Alek and Mireya. Unfortunately for Revan, who already knows exactly which strategies she’ll employ against this fleet, it also means she has little to do for those three days.

Put simply, she’s bored to tears, which is how she finds herself on the ship’s lowest decks after hours watching Mireya’s green blade flash as she works her way through a circle of training droids. The lightsaber pike’s end sparks as it strikes the floor, and Mireya finally backs down in frustration, shutting off the droids with a wave of her hand. The pike is still awkward in her hands; she’s used to wielding a single blade, not this two-ended weapon. Revan can sense how hesitant her strokes have become.

“I don’t understand!” she says, frustrated, and glances up at Revan, who is sprawled out across a stack of empty shipping crates. “It just doesn’t want to obey me.”

Revan swivels around to face her fully and hops down. This late at night, she’s set her mask to the side and lost a few layers of robes; no one is likely to come down here, and a tendril of power probes the closed door and the hallway outside just in case a stray soldier does come snooping.

“The lightsaber is relatively new,” she reminds Mireya as though the padawan didn’t build it herself. “You’re used to balancing your weight in a different manner. It took me months to master Jar’Kai after I started using a second lightsaber. A pike will be even more difficult.”

Mireya huffs out a breath and ignites the blade, settling back into more familiar stances. Revan watches her carefully as she strikes out once, twice—and there, a familiar pause as her blade comes down.

“What was that?” Revan asks.

“What?”

“On your downward swing, just before you struck the droid. You hesitated.”

“I wasn’t sure if I was aiming at the right place,” Mireya hesitantly admits. “I didn’t want to miss.”

And that is the core of her problem. Revan says as much, igniting her own lightsabers in a flash of blue. She moves through her stances fluidly, and when she strikes, she strikes _hard_. No hesitation before the droid’s head goes tumbling from its metal body.

Well, they needed new training droids anyway.

“The lightsaber is an extension of your limb. You know that much already or you wouldn’t be standing here,” Revan tells Mireya. “You have to be in tune with it. No hesitation. You can’t keep thinking of it as separate from the one you used to wield.”  
Mireya’s original saber had been a casualty of the battle before Duro; one well-aimed shot had sent it spinning straight off the side of a ship hanging low in the atmosphere, where it promptly vanished, never to be seen again. When she’d built her new one mere days later, she had found a unique design in the Jedi Archives: a weapon that was half staff, half lightsaber. As she later relayed, the Force had called her to build her own, only now that it was built and she began using it, it never seemed to take like her old one.

Mireya sighs and looks down at the smooth silver hilt resting in her palms.

“It’s hard not to,” she confesses. “They feel so similar that I forget I’m not using the same lightsaber I’ve been using since I became a padawan.”

“Learn to feel the counterweight of its end,” Revan suggests. “And start practicing with it fully extended, not just the single blade. You’ll become too reliant on familiarity if you do.”

Hands clasped behind her back, she twists her fingers and smiles as the end of the pile shoots out, striking Mireya in the knees. She yelps and glares at Revan, rubbing her newly-bruised kneecap.

“Like I said. Come on, let’s spar. I want to see how you balance it.”

The pike’s phrik-alloy end proves useful in deflecting Revan’s lower blows. Though Mireya still struggles to use it offensively, she is growing more confident with each strike she blocks; Revan can almost feel the moment when her mind switches off and she becomes one with the lightsaber. Despite—or perhaps because of—her shorter stature, the pike begins to work to her advantage; she holds Revan’s lightsabers off no matter what direction Revan strikes, and Revan finally steps back with a grin. If she really wanted to, she had a half dozen opportunities to win the fight, but she’s also _Revan;_ the likelihood of Mireya facing an opponent of similar skill is slim.

“Something changed for you, didn’t it?” she asks as she hangs her lightsabers on her belt. Mireya nods tentatively as the pike’s handle compresses to become a standard hilt once more.

“I just felt… connected,” she says, seating herself on a nearby crate. “I had to realize that it doesn’t feel the same as an ordinary lightsaber, and then it was there. Then I got it.”

She looks up at Revan, grinning, and Revan can’t help but smile back.

“Connection to the blade. It’s how they taught us in the Temple,” she continues, her smile fading to a fond, soft expression. “We used to sit there for hours trying to connect to our kyber crystals and feel the lightsaber as it moved.”

“Back on Dantooine, they got us to connect during sparring,” Revan says, surprised at how easily the words begin to flow. “We either learned to feel everything around us or we got a _lot_ of bruises. The ones who still couldn’t get it got special instruction, but most of us did fine.”

Revan thinks she hears a note of wistfulness when Mireya says, “Dantooine sounds interesting. The Temple was my home, and I did love it, but it never quite seemed free. It was impossible to forget that outside us was a city on every side, all the way across the planet. I think I would have liked visiting the enclave.”

“The enclave was free, to a certain extent,” Revan says, “but there weren’t always a lot of people around, and that isn’t the right environment for everyone. Many of the younglings I grew up with left once they were made padawans or after they were knighted. Jedi often like being able to reach out in the Force and feel as much as they can on Coruscant. Even I do, on occasion.”

“Then why stay there?”

Revan sighs.

“Some people feel free when they’re surrounded by people. For me, standing on the bluffs staring out and seeing nothing but grassland and a few twisted trees was the freest I ever felt. The nights were so dark I could look up and see more stars than you would believe, even from the planet’s surface. I used to go out as far as I could and stand out in the grass and just breathe. I’d reach out as far as I could, sense the Force around me, and see how much I could really feel. That became my meditation when I couldn’t quiet myself. When you spend years knowing a place, some part of it gets inside you, I think.”

“I miss the Temple, too. It was nice to be able to feel all the Jedi around me. Masters, younglings, _everyone._ The Temple itself felt alive half the time. There was a room at its heart filled with fountains and plants; I used to ditch my lessons and sneak out there just to get away from it all; I’d sit there beneath the trees for hours until someone eventually came and found me. All the Force signatures of the Jedi around me… They always helped to calm me. Out here, it’s not the same. I can feel the other Jedi, sure, but the ships just aren’t like the Jedi Temple.”

“Open space is the closest I get to the grasslands.” Revan casts her mind back to her childhood, to days and nights spent running wild. In almost all her memories, Alek is at her side; she smiles as she recalls his teenage dare to climb to the Jedi Enclave’s roof and how he followed her once she found her route up. Vrook had yelled himself blue when they almost came crashing through a woven overhang straight onto another knight, but Revan had been too busy laughing to care (not that she ever listened to him anyway).

Mireya glances down at the chrono on her wrist, then back up at Revan guiltily. It’s almost midnight; she needs to get to bed, she explains, or she’ll be dead on her feet the next morning. Revan can understand that. Beneath her excitement and the happiness twining through her Force signature, Revan can feel the bitter notes of exhaustion.

“Go, Mireya. We can talk later,” she reassures the padawan. “Come spar with me when you’re free. I had fun.”

The admission seems to shock Mireya. She pauses in the doorway, reluctance evident in the air around her, but eventually turns and exits. Slowly, her presence grows fainter and fainter until it fades into the background energy of the _Basilisk._ Revan grins after her. Mireya’s skill has developed incredibly since Revan met her. She still has a long way to go, but Revan can recognize her brilliant potential, both in combat and outside.

Mireya is a good ally and a good friend. Revan dearly wants to see how far she can go.

Eventually, Revan gives up on distracting herself from the tedium of hyperspace and retreats to her quarters. Alek is asleep already, and he always gets irritated if she wakes him up to complain that she has nothing to do. Mireya, of course, is preparing for bed. Of the few other people Revan would consider seeking out—the recently promoted Captain Passik, Admiral Saul Karath, or one of her other command officers—most are either on other ships or busy with their own tasks. Without anyone to talk to, she has few choices but meditation or sleep, and she’s not ready for sleep.

Meditation it is. She slips the mask from her face, sets it on her bed, and kneels down on her meditation mat beside it. She rarely rolls the mat up anymore, preferring to have it available whenever she needs; it is a familiar comfort, one of the few things she still owns from Dantooine. She centers herself on its worn middle, where years of meditating have worn it thin. The next motions are familiar: she strips her lightsabers, places them at her side, and opens the chambers that contain her kyber crystals. She likes being able to feel them beneath her fingers; by now, she can tell them apart by touch alone.

When the _Basilisk_ is in place, Revan likes facing the windows in her quarters so she can see the stars as she meditates. In hyperspace, she prefers to watch lights flicker across the familiar durasteel walls of her quarters, and that is what she does tonight. She lets her consciousness sink into the Force, stretches out her mind and her hands to the kyber crystals within her sabers, and repeats the meditation mantra every Jedi knows by heart.

 _There is no emotion; there is peace._ Screaming white-hot anger, the burning heart of a battlefield.

 _There is no ignorance; there is knowledge._ Frantic half-finished strategies and fear as the enemies break her traps.

 _There is no passion; there is serenity._ Revan standing alone, chest heaving as bodies fall around her.

 _There is no chaos; there is harmony._ Cutting down enemy soldiers until she almost strikes one of her own in the fury of battle, soaked with blood and rain and half-mad with adrenaline.

 _There is no death; there is the Force._ Jedi falling, life signatures guttering out, and Revan pushing forward.

 _No._ She is not reliving every moment of her weakness. She wants calm. She wants the Force to bring her peace before she soaks her hands in blood at the next battle.

She tightens her fingers over the kyber crystals in her lightsaber and closes her eyes.

 _Bring me peace._

The twin kyber crystals hum deep in her bones. The nexus of her own power, swirling with frenetic energy, lashes out to meet them, until she cannot tell where she ends and the crystals begin. They echo off her, triple points of reverberation, more harmonic than they have been since she built her second saber and felt them resonate back then. Power magnifies power; scarcely thinking, she stretches out to feel the ship, then the fleet following her through hyperspace. The Jedi are so _alive_. She latches on to them, little points of power in a void.

The Revanchists, her followers. They are hers. And she will protect them—protect the galaxy. She will not let this much life go out, not under the Mandalorians’ weapons.

Her kyber crystals whisper their agreement.

Revan doesn’t know how long she spends stretched out into the Force, only that her joints are stiff when she returns to her own body, and she is more in-tune with her lightsabers than she has been in years. The kyber crystals have changed; she can feel the difference when she reaches for them. Just as the war has altered her, she has altered them.

She lifts up her oldest saber and ignites it.

And on her lightsaber’s humming blade, a flickering golden ring now lies between the white core and the old familiar blue.

The colors of a guardian and a knight.

Revan can live up to those ideals.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mando’a translation: “You have the right stuff (i.e., Mandalorian virtues), equal to us.”  
> And this, dear readers, is what we call foreshadowing. So much of what Revan thinks or says will come back to bite her. It's fun to write, but it's also just a little awful. This was a very fun chapter to write. No battles, unlike most of the story, but I have a special fondness for meditation and soft moments of quiet.  
> As always, comments and kudos are greatly appreciated. Enjoy!


	4. Onism

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _The Force screams out a warning but she’s holding a Mandalorian transport in place and she can’t drop it fast enough to get her saber down, and then there’s pain in her belly and a dull, cold ache spreading along her side, and a vicious, snarling warrior is standing in front of her when she turns her head until he_ isn’t _, until a lightsaber that isn’t hers severs his head from his neck and he is nothing more than another muddy corpse._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Onism (n): The frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time.

Two weeks. They’ve been stuck planetside for  _ two weeks, _ and the fighting has barely started.

Revan ducks back into the trench and sets her monoculars aside with a terse motion. Still no sign of the main body of the Mandalorians’ forces here, even though they’ve caught a few minor groups since they landed. The scanners on her ships are rendered useless by the thick vegetation; whatever the trees and vines are made of here, the scanners can’t cut through them, and the mist just compounds the effect. They’ve had to follow the old-fashioned way: on foot, traipsing around a jungle like they aren’t the leading military force in the galaxy trying to find the trail of an army that doesn’t want to be found.

Revan is the Supreme Commander of the Republic Military. She has single-handedly won them more conquered worlds than she can count in the months since Chancellor Cressa gave her that title. She will win them this war if it’s the last thing she does.

But Force, surely all this isn’t necessary.

She grimaces as her boot sinks into a pool of stagnant water. Mimban is a miserable swamp world, but she can understand why the Mandalorians chose it to hide while they plot whatever it is that they’re plotting. The atmosphere makes it almost impossible for most ships to land—which is why Revan’s fleet is currently orbiting Force knows where above them, barely within comm range on a good day, and Revan is down slogging through mud with half the Revanchists and a good deal of her Republic troops. The Mandalorians aren’t stupid, unfortunately, and she’s sure they know she’s arrived. But she can at least hope that they’re in a similarly awful condition.

The familiar hiss of a lightsaber ignition catches her ear; she looks up to see Mireya, pike extended, circling one of the other Jedi, a young togruta. Most of the Jedi have been growing as restless as she is, so they’ve taken to sparring in the slowest moments of the day. Revan doesn’t mind, as long as they stay as quiet as the rest of the camp and don’t send up any signals that will bring the Mandalorians down on them.

For all Revan knows, the Mandalorians are halfway across the planet. Wouldn’t that be a joke?

Force, she hates this.

Luckily, even if their ships don’t work, speeders, transports, and probe droids do. Revan has a report on every one of the jungle’s thousands of native fauna, if she were so inclined to read them—she’s not—and whenever the droids find evidence of the passage of humanoid creatures, they can reach the areas quickly enough. Only twice have they been able to catch any Mandalorians—small scouting patrols both times, with little indication of where they came from—but anything helps.

“Supreme Commander!” calls one of the Republic officers. Revan sighs, though she knows he can’t see it. The title is… ostentatious, to be honest, and though it’s no longer new, it doesn’t always sit easy on her shoulders.

“Yes, lieutenant?” she asks him. Though she doesn’t know his face, he’s one of their tech experts, so he’ll either have a new report or another missing droid for her.

Luckily, it’s the new report.

“Just came in from the south,” he says as he hands over a datapad. “Apparently, they picked up on something interesting. I thought you’d want to see the report immediately.”

Revan scrolls through it. She’s expecting the usual; a patrol of three or four Mandalorians, maybe some transports or equipment. Instead, the tracks show a much larger force has swept through the area. A major part of the force, at least, if not the whole thing. Finally. After two weeks, they’re finally catching up.

“Send this report to the generals and the commanders,” she orders, handing him the datapad. “And one copy to me. We’ve got our prey in sight.”

Within fifteen minutes, they’re ready to go. Half their forces remain behind as a reserve to guard the camp; Revan takes the others, arrayed on speeders or other transports, and takes off in the direction that the probe droid indicated.

It doesn’t take them long to find the tail end of the Mandalorians. Just as Revan suspected, the main body of their forces lies just ahead. They’re all on high alert, but Revan’s approach is quiet as she signals her forces to spread out. So far, no one has noticed them. And if they can catch them unaware, Revan will walk away with another victory under her belt.

_ Is it Fett? _ Alek, who’s propped himself in a tree with surprising grace, can’t risk asking the question out loud.

_ I don’t know. They’re out here plotting an attack; that’s all I have. _ She slips behind a tree and palms her lightsabers, eyeing the steadily moving army. They’re close. Bleeding Force, they’re so close.

A flash of solid beskar armor, usually reserved only for the higher-ranking among them (too many bodies, not enough metal to clad them all), appears up ahead. Silently, Revan keys open her wrist comm.

“Now,” she hisses, and as one, her forces attack. Jedi drop from above, soldiers pour out of the jungle, and Revan in black steps from the shadows, blue and gold reflected off her mask as she lifts her sabers and joins the fray. She is grinning behind her mask. Here and now, they’re ending this.

Revan is several bodies deep, sabers spinning around her, when she realizes why this fight is suddenly growing difficult. It isn’t her lack of practice; these aren’t the Mandalorians they so often meet in battle. These are elite forces, trained to kill Jedi, and their hard work is paying off.

Revan barely dodges a low-swung vibroblade and spins out of reach, keeping an eye on the others. She’s lost forces already, soldiers and Jedi, but not too many. They still have a shot at winning this.

One warrior gets too close to Mireya and the flashing edges of her pike and Revan smashes him into a tree with a tight wave of her hand. He doesn’t get up again; Mireya gives her a tight nod and ducks back into the fight. Another three die the same way. Revan spears one on a dead branch, throws one deep into the jungle, and simply crushes the armor of the third, holding off blaster bolts with her opposite hand as she dances out of reach of her own opponents. They are winning.  _ She _ is winning.

She is—

The Force screams out a warning but she’s holding a Mandalorian transport in place and she can’t drop it fast enough to get her saber down, and then there’s pain in her belly and a dull, cold ache spreading along her side, and a vicious, snarling warrior is standing in front of her when she turns her head until he  _ isn’t,  _ until a lightsaber that isn’t hers severs his head from his neck and he is nothing more than another muddy corpse.

_ Good, _ some savage part of her snarls. The cold in her stomach is growing; she reaches for her lightsaber, though she doesn’t remember dropping it, only to find that her motions are sluggish. She frowns and tries to lift it again, and the pain strikes her like a crashing starship.

She looks down at her side. A wet patch has flattened her robes to her side. She thinks it’s water that darkens the black fabric, only the sharp metallic scent of blood suddenly strikes her nose.

Blood. But how could the Mandalorian have bled on her? He’s dead, he’s on the ground, and she’s standing.

Someone in the distance yells. The fight has died around Revan, though, around her and the bodies lying at her feet. She takes a step and wavers at the sudden wave of dizziness that strikes her, and then it’s all she can do to stay upright.

“Revan!” She knows that voice. Blinking blearily upwards—and when did she land on her knees? Oh, it’s Alek standing there. She can’t quite make out his face, but she knows it’s him.

She’s so cold. That must be her adrenaline wearing off. Her side hurts, too. Did it get bruised? Maybe that Mandalorian got a hit in.

“Revan! Come on, stay awake— _stay awake—medic!”_ _Rev, come on, come on, just listen to me. Keep your eyes open!_

_ What—what’s happening? _ She isn’t sure she asked it out loud. Her brain is fuzzy, as though it’s been stuffed with cotton, and the pain has grown worse. She can sense fear and oh, that’s Alek’s, that’s his fear and his panic. Why is he so afraid?

His face swims across her field of vision. She hears another cry for a medic, this one even more frantic.

“You have to stay awake. Listen,  _ listen! _ You have to stay awake, okay?”

“I’m awake,” she tries to say, only it comes out more as a drawn-out groan. There’s pressure against her side, pressure and pain—she gasps sharply as something pierces her skin. It hurts. It hurts so much.

She just wants to sleep. Darkness is pressing against the sides of her skull and black spots swim across her eyes. Something pulses in her side beneath the pain and the chill.

She can’t hold it off any longer. She can’t keep her head above the waves. She can’t…

She surrenders to the darkness.

Kriff, her body hurts. The pain is concentrated in an aching radius around her right side, where a dull throb has brought her out of unconsciousness.

Revan opens her eyes slowly and squints at the bright light of a field medbay. Soft beeping fills the air around her; she groans and swipes a hand over her face, hoping to clear some of the fog. As she moves,  _ relief _ floods her so strongly she thinks the emotion must be hers, until she turns her head to see Alek slumped over in a chair beside her bed.

For a moment, neither of them say anything. Revan is still trying to piece together her hazy memories, and Alek looks as though he hasn’t slept in days, though she can feel his emotions through the bond. A surprising amount of worry coats his thoughts.

“Hey, Squint,” she murmurs, reaching out a hand to nudge the one currently resting beside her. He squeezes her fingers, a familiar gesture of comfort, and swallows.

“I thought you weren’t going to make it,” he says hoarsely. “Out there on the battlefield, when you went down…”

“What happened? I don’t remember much, just shock and cold,” she confesses.

“You were stabbed in the side. The knife hit some major organs; you’re lucky the medics had enough kolto to tide you over until we could get you back there. Even then, you almost died. You almost  _ died, _ Revan. I don’t think I’ve ever been more terrified in my life.”

She tries to smile, though it doesn’t quite come out right.

“Still here, though, aren’t I?” she answers. “Come on, Alek. I’ll be back on my feet in no time.”   
_ No. _ He doesn’t bother to say it out loud, just fixes her with a level look and says it straight into her head.  _ Get up from that bed and I will strap you to it. _

“That’s a little unfair.”

“Can you actually stand?” he challenges. She narrows her eyes and attempts to sit up; the pain hits and she falls back with a groan as her head hits the pillow.

As her head hits the pillow. Her uncovered head. Her hair isn’t even braided, she suddenly realizes; it’s a tangled mess hanging loose over her shoulders. She’s wearing nothing but a medical gown and several layers of bandages. Her face is uncovered, completely open to the air.

“Where’s the mask?” she demands. One of the monitors on the bed begins to beep a little faster. “Alek. Where is it?” She needs it. She needs her mask or they’re all going to see her face and know how far she’s fallen. She has to be in control; she’s the  _ Supreme Commander— _

_ Revan. _ Alek’s voice stills her enough to think again, just a little; he pushes calm through the Force, letting the fiery fear in her veins fade out little by little.  _ Just listen to me. _

She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. No one but Alek is here right now. She’s fine. She’s  _ fine. _

She opens them again when something heavy lands on her leg and almost cries seeing the familiar black shape with its red edges. She hasn’t touched it bare-handed in a very long time; her skin looks paler than its usual dark tan when she stretches out her hands and lifts it to her face. She can’t actually put it on yet, especially since she can’t even lift her arm that high without pain lancing through her, but  _ Force, _ she misses its weight already.

She looks between the mask and Alek. A half-smile tugs at the corner of his mouth; whatever he sees on her face, it must be a relief to him.

“They had to take it off to treat you. I’ve been keeping it safe.”

_ Thank you _ doesn’t quite encompass what she’s feeling, though without any walls up, she knows Alek can sense the swell of affection in her chest. The mask is a symbol of her leadership; she has never faced her people without it, and she has no desire to start now. Of course Alek knows what it means to her; of course he kept it safe.

“I thought you’d at least want to know that it survived the battle,” he says.

The battle. “Why aren’t you out there fighting?” she asks. He’s her second for a reason, and she would expect him to take control when she couldn’t, so for Mireya to be in charge now breeds confusion in her mind.

Alek looks away. “You were too close to dying for me to leave. I don’t know what sort of Jedi that makes me, but I couldn’t walk away.” He hesitates for a moment, as though there’s more he wants to say, but he doesn’t open his mouth again, just sighs and leans back in the chair.

“How long can you stay here?” she asks after a few moments, when she can’t bear the silence or his solemn face.

“I do need to get back to the command center,” he says regretfully. “Mireya wanted my advice on a few things before too long.” He pushes back from her bedside and stands, wincing at the stiffness of his muscles.

“Alek,” she calls as he moves to leave. “Wait.”

“What?”

She pauses.

_ My hair, _ she finally projects.  _ I can’t lift my arm high enough. _

Her head feels too light without the weight of her braid behind it. Now that it’s loose, the black locks hang down to her waist, a thick mess tangled from her unconscious tossing. She can’t quite bear the humiliation of asking for help out loud, but Alek’s mind is as familiar to her as her own, so she can share the thought.

For half a second, she thinks he’s going to refuse. This is unfamiliar territory, even for him; at the worst, she could always just ask one of the med staff to do it. But he pauses and returns to her bedside.

“Of course,” he answers. “C’mon. Scoot over.”

Gratefully, she does. She can feel her face flush as she makes as much room for Alek as she can without causing herself too much pain; she’s irrationally glad that he can’t see it as he climbs onto the bed behind her. He’s managed to find a comb from somewhere near her bedside, and apparently her usual store of hair ties has survived the battle and made its way into his possession along with all the other things they stripped her of when they saved her. He won’t have to leave again.

Alek reaches up and squeezes her shoulder. Something about the gesture and its soft, casual intimacy relaxes her, and she leans back into him almost unconsciously. Alek is warm, Alek is  _ safe; _ she needs the security he’s always provided right now. She’s been stripped of every defense, every wall between her and the world, and he’s the only person in the galaxy who’s ever seen her like that before.

He’s the only person she’s ever trusted to see her so vulnerable.

He brushes the ends of her hair back over her shoulder and begins to comb them, speaking as he does. Revan lets her eyes close and fades into the hum of his words. She isn’t listening to what he’s saying, but the gentle pull on her hair and the warm shadow she feels in the Force is enough. She’s tired and in pain, and even these small comforts help.

She is half-asleep, soothed by the rhythmic motions of the comb in her hair, when Alek addresses her directly once more.

_ You didn’t hear a word of that, did you? _ he asks, trying and failing to sound disappointed. Revan doesn’t even open her eyes as she grins. The fondness radiating off of him is too strong for that, and besides, he knows what she’s like.

“Not one word,” she replies with a laugh. “Hope it wasn’t a battle report.”

“Oh, yes, I was just telling you the Supreme Commander’s latest set of orders, plus a list of all the things you  _ personally  _ need to do,” he answers lightly. “Should I bring you your datapad? Those mission reports won’t write themselves.”

“Mm. Write them for me, will you? I know you can forge my signature,” she murmurs.

“Supreme Commander, are you suggesting I commit fraud?”

“Yes. Absolutely and without remorse. Ow!” Alek tugs on a particularly tight knot near the base of her neck a little harder than he needs to.

“Sorry, what were you saying?”

“You can’t see my face, but I’m glaring at you.”

He snorts. “You’re not glaring at anything. You’re about to start purring like a tooka.”

It’s true, but Revan resents the comparison. She reaches back and swats him in the knee. As if to prove his point, he scrapes his nails against her scalp, laughing softly at the noise that escapes her as he does.

“I hate you,” she grumbles, but Force, that felt good.

I’m sure you do.

Alek withdraws his hands. At Revan’s protest—and if she actually said those words out loud, the med staff must have given her the strong stuff—he nudges the shoulder on her uninjured side, a silent reassurance that he’s not leaving. Just retrieving a hair tie, she realizes; he’s gotten the tangles out of her hair and is preparing to braid it.

“We’re winning the battle,” he says as he sections her hair off and flips one long section back around to her front. “I know you would have asked sooner or later. After they carted you off the field, Mireya stayed back and took command; she’s picked up a lot from you, enough that our people could hold their ground. And we’re not going to lose, so don’t think about trying to plan out a strategy from here.”

“Good. Mireya knows what she’s doing when she gets the confidence to give orders,” Revan says, smiling faintly. “Speaking of the battle, what happened after that warrior stabbed me? I remember a flash; was there a lightsaber? Who killed him?”

Alek’s motions still for a second.

“I did,” he finally says. It sounds like an admission, like a confession, not a simple statement of who killed whom in battle.

Revan frowns. Her memories are hazy, but—

“Weren’t you across the battlefield?” she asks. His quiet affirmation filters across the bond; it does little to ease Revan’s confusion. “Then how—”

_ I threw my lightsaber. _

Oh. Revan has done that before, a maneuver Alek has called reckless many times, stupid at least once, and dangerous three times that she can remember, and that’s when she has a second one to defend herself with. For him to execute it with a single weapon in the heat of battle…

_ The knife went in and I could feel it, _ he continues. “I didn’t think. He had to die.” He continues braiding her hair, though the movements are more cautious now, as though he’s worried about her reaction. As though she wouldn’t do the same for him (as though she hasn’t already).

She sends a pulse of warmth across the bond, enough to reassure him. He relaxes at that; she feels the deep sigh he releases and the way that his motions grow looser. He’s nearly done with the braid. She feels a familiar pull as he secures the end, then runs a hand along its length to check for stray locks.

_ Thank you, _ she whispers across the bond, as softly as she can.

He pauses with his hands curled at the nape of her neck and leans forward, just enough that she feels the careful press of his forehead against her hair.

“I’m glad you’re alright," he murmurs, and the Force shivers around him. For a moment, the sheer staggering depth of his emotion overwhelms her; and then, as though a switch has been flipped, it’s gone.

Alek really was terrified for her out in the jungle. Revan can feel the truth of that as he lets her braid drop with one last soft pull.

“They need me out with the rest,” he says apologetically. “The med staff let me stay with you until you woke up, but I think they’ll be here to kick me out soon enough.” Revan hears the shuffle of moving cloth as he uncrosses his legs and clambers down from the bed; as soon as he’s gone, she misses the heat of his body. The bed is too cold, and the chilled kolto slowly leeching the pain from her side doesn’t help. She’s tired, too; blood loss took its toll on her, and the pain has worn her out.

“Get some sleep,” Alek says as Revan settles back into place with a wince. He’s grinning fondly at her as he nudges her shoulder, and she smiles back, though hers must look a hundred times more tired than his. Whatever he sees on her face, it causes him to smile a little softer, and Revan feels quiet affection wrap around the loose edges of the bond.

“Sap,” she murmurs tiredly, though she reaches out a hand and tangles her fingers with his just enough to give his hand a reassuring squeeze.

He shakes his head, still grinning, and steps back.

“Sleep,” he repeats. “Then they might let you out.”

With Alek gone, she returns to staring at her mask. Her section of the medbay is all but empty, and a heavy curtain prevents her from seeing anything outside her little bubble. She’s all but cut off from the outside world. She can’t see a datapad nearby, and none of the medics have stopped by to check on her, so she can only assume that her vitals must look normal.

She’s bored already, after all of a minute alone, and she misses Alek. Without him to distract her, her mind is too focused on the battle that must still be raging outside. How long was she unconscious? How is Mireya doing? Casualties, injuries, supplies—how many Mandalorians escaped and who is leading them?

Alek is right, she can’t stand, but she needs to know, even if she’s not on the field with them. She needs to be helping. If someone will just bring her a map and a list of strategies, she’ll hand them a victory in fifteen minutes.

“Supreme Commander!” A bright, cheerful young medic brushes through the curtain around Revan’s bed. The tightly-curled halo of dark blue hair and pale red skin mark her as a Zeltron, and her face is unfamiliar; she must be one of the new medics assigned to them at their last refueling.

“General Alek mentioned you were awake when he left,” the medic continues, running a scanner over Revan’s side. She winces as the medic pulls at the edge of her robe,but eventually acquiesces and tugs it up high enough that she can access the wound. The bandages lie just above the loose pair of hospital pants she’s currently wearing and wrap around a surprisingly large area of her side; the injury is starting to throb again, and when the Zeltron reaches down and begins to remove them, Revan can’t help but groan.

The medic looks up sharply. Revan squints at her nametag;  _ Dr. Brellin, _ it reads.

“Tell me how much pain you’re in,” Brellin orders.

Revan knows this drill. “Three,” she answers, trying to fit as much boredom as she can into her voice. She can handle pain; she needs to be  _ out _ , no matter what Alek said.

“A three,” Brellin repeats. “A three out of ten with a hole in your side. You do recall that Zeltrons are low-grade telepaths, correct?”

Revan glares, wishing that the mask was sitting on her face rather than in her lap. People listen to her when she’s wearing it; now she’s just another young face in a medical bed.

“It’s true,” she insists. “Honestly. Another few hours of kolto and I’ll be fine.”

“Ma’am, I understand that you’re in charge on the battlefield, but in here, your authority means nothing,” she answers in a surprisingly level tone of voice. “This is a field hospital. We don’t have kolto tanks to stuff you in until your skin knits back together; we have this.” She gestures at the cart she hauled in behind her, stacked with packs of kolto. Revan sinks back down, a little cowed. Brellin is right; she’s used to the rapid effects of kolto tanks, but they can barely contact her ship right now, let alone get a shuttle down to pick her up and bring her back. In any way, she can’t leave the battle now, not when their victory isn’t decided.

“A six or a seven,” she finally answers. “The pain, I mean. I can take the edge off with the Force, but not for much longer.” And indeed, the Force has been steadily sapping her energy in an effort to curb the ache in her side. When she lets that sliver of power go, the pain hits her like a freighter.

“Right,” Brellin says. “I need to check the injury just to be sure it’s not infected, and then I’ll stick some more kolto on it, okay? It’ll be a few minutes of pain, but the kolto should kick in pretty rapidly, and I’ve got some meds for you once I’m finished.”

“I’m  _ fine _ ,” Revan insists with gritted teeth. “Just get it over with.”

Despite Revan’s obvious insistence—why do none of these people ever listen to her?—Brellin pulls the bandage off slowly,then swabs her skin and pats it dry with gauze. Revan can’t twist over far enough to see much of the stab itself, but the skin around it is reddened, and Revan almost yelps as Brellin tears open a pack of kolto gel and spreads it across the cut.

“The good news,” she murmurs as she works, “is that the redness isn’t from infection. It looks like you’ve aggravated the injury, which means you’re on bed rest for as long as I say you are. It looks far better than it did when the general brought you in. If you don’t do anything stupid—” she punctuates this with a sharp look and a slight press on the bruise around the stab wound— “you should be good to walk in two days or so.”

“Two days?” Revan exclaims. “If Mireya hasn’t hunted all the Mandalorians down by then, she never will. What am I supposed to do stuck in here?”

“You’re supposed to recover, Supreme Commander. A Mando just stuck a vibroblade in your gut.”

“Can I at least have my datapad?” she asks. The words come out mure sulky than she intended, and she winces internally. Hells, she misses being able to wear the mask. It evens out her voice as well as hides her face, enough that only her closest companions can sense the inflections that mark her words. And now this doctor can read her as easily as Alek can.

Brellin finishes up with the bandage and returns Revan’s tunic to its place.

“I’ll see what I can do about the datapad,” she reassures her. “For now, you should rest. I’m sure you’ll have visitors soon.”

She steers the hovering medical cart back out of the curtains with a final goodbye, and once more Revan is left alone.

Eventually, someone shows up with her datapad and a stern order to not make any attempt to leave her bed. That relieves her boredom; the datapad is loaded with notes and strategies, and a preliminary battle report signed with Mireya’s jagged signature is waiting when she checks her messages. Unfortunately, she knows all those strategies like the back of her hand, and coming up with new variations begins to give her a headache after half an hour or so. Mireya’s report is thorough, but there isn’t much to do about it besides send a congratulatory message to the padawan for winning such a decisive victory.

When the pulsing ache in her temples gets too much to bear, she sets aside strategy. This datapad is her personal one, not the government-issued one she keeps with her in the field, so it has more than folders full of strategy; several episodes of her favorite holoshows have been downloaded as well, and if she can’t do anything with the battle, she might as well distract herself. She props the datapad against her knees and finds her favorite episode of  _ Coruscant 770. _ At least Alek won’t make fun of her for watching them now (as if he and his terrible Alderaanian soap operas have any legs to stand on).

Forty-five minutes later, she’s almost done with the episode. Detective Tri’less, a togruta trying to find her footing on the force despite her haunting backstory, is finally closing in on the suspect (her long-lost sister, not that she knows it, but Revan has practically memorized this entire arc).

_ “Freeze!” _ the detective shouts, blaster leveled down the alleyway. And out steps the suspect, now without her distinctive mask—Revan grins as she watches Tri’less stop in shock.

_ “Ayane?”  _ she whispers. The other togruta’s eyes widen.

_ “Rell?” _ Ayane cries, and the screen goes dark. Revan, of course, knows how this ends; Rell is dragged back into her criminal past in order to protect her sister in the lowest levels of Coruscant while keeping police off her tail, and Ayane has to contend with Hutt gangsters hunting her mercilessly. Eventually, Rell has to face the main villain: her corrupt boss, who’s been pulling the strings for seasons.

Revan queues up the next episode and settles down, at which point a shard of light pierces the relative gloom of her bed and she looks up to see a tall silhouette in the gap in the curtains.

“ _ Justice Under Twin Suns _ again?” Alek asks, flicking the overhead light on with a gesture.

“ _ Justice Under— _ This is clearly not  _ Justice Under Twin Suns, _ ” she exclaims, gesturing to the distinctive neon lights and massive cityscape. “Does this  _ look _ like Tatooine to you?”

“Oh, I can’t tell them apart,” he says flippantly, though he’s grinning.

“ _ Coruscant 770 _ is a household name! It’s not my issue if you’re just that out of touch.”

“Forgive me if bad police procedurals fail to hold my interest.”

_ Oh, and  _ The Gem of Naboo _ does?  _ she snaps. That causes an eye roll.

“ _ The Gem of Naboo _ is a second-rate pile of garbage and I haven’t watched it in years. I told you, they hook up in the second episode; it’s terrible! It’s about—”

“The pining, yes, you’ve told me a hundred times; that still doesn’t explain why you  _ like _ them so much.”

“ _ Love Under—” _

“Alek,” she says patiently, “you are my best friend, and I love you, but if you even  _ try _ to convince me that  _ Love Under an Alderaanian Sky _ isn’t an overacted, drawn-out mess, I’m demoting you and replacing you with the nearest semi-sentient creature.

“As if you didn’t use a strategy from  _ The Temple Watch _ last month,” he replies. Revan blushes.

_ It’s a good show! _

_ Yes, I’m sure the numerous inaccuracies about Jedi life really endeared you to it. _ He manages to sound drier in her mind than he does out loud.

Revan groans. “Can we talk about something besides your awful taste in holoshows?” she asks, reaching out to swat him in the side.  _ As if  _ Hearts of Kyber _ is any better in the accuracy department, by the way _

Alek shoots her a slightly miffed look, but relents and flops down in the chair beside her bed.

“Mireya has the battle well in hand,” he reports. “She’s got four patrols out hunting the Mandalorians who escaped, and she just captured their commander. Another of Mandalore’s generals. He hasn’t mentioned exactly what Mandalore’s plan was, but Mireya’s working on that. We can’t leave until the patrols are back, but it won’t be too long now.”

A sigh escapes her. The tedium is getting to her; she hasn’t rested this much since she was a padawan. Without her lightsabers and her mask, what does she have? At least she has them with her, even if she can’t actually wear them.

“Distract me” she finally says when the silence grows too strong. Alek, who’s stolen her datapad and is scrolling through her messages, looks up in surprise.

“Isn’t that what all those shows are for?”

“Useless. I’ve seen  _ Coruscant 770 _ more times than I can count; it’s no fun when I can recite all the big speeches. C’mon, Squint, just for a little while,” she pleads.

Eventually, he relents, especially when she moves as far to one side as she can and pats the bed. It’s too small for them both when they’re curled up side-by-side—Alek takes up far more room than the sliver she can spare, and neither of them are short enough to fold themselves up comfortably, especially with the hole in Revan’s gut. They used to share a bunk on starships as padawans and younger knights, and the few weeks they spent on Coruscant were much the same, and the familiarity of Alek’s shoulder pressed against hers and the way he wraps an arm around her are worth the twinges of discomfort. If she can’t be out there with him fighting Mandalorians and leading her army, then at least he’s at her side here as she dozes off unarmored and weaponless.

His Force signature is a steady presence at her side until she falls asleep, this time for good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alternate chapter titles include "Idiots with Feelings" and "Every doctor from here to the Outer Rim hates having to deal with Revan."  
> If you're wondering what awful shows Mireya watches, they're bad daytime dramas that generally involve hot mob bosses and approximately three murders per episode.  
> Anyway, enjoy these idiots. Please feel free to leave comments and kudos and enjoy!


	5. Acatalepsy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Today will not be a good day. Revan knows that with all the certainty her body possesses. But the deaths have to be worth stopping the Mandalorians. There is no other option._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Acatalepsy (n): incomprehensibility, or the impossibility of comprehending or conceiving a thing.

The Force has been howling at Revan since her fleet hit orbit around Eres III. As her boots hit the soot-stained ground, it _screams._

Their shuttles have landed in a half-circle on a thick plain of Xoxin. The blackened mineral crunches beneath her strike team as they hop from their shuttles. Mireya has already crouched down to analyze the material; Alek just feels worried.

“You can feel it, can’t you?” he asks quietly as the team hauls equipment from the vehicles. Revan nods and bites down on a shiver.

“I know they’re out here somewhere. Their fleet is a distraction.” She’s explained this before; that feeling is the reason that while her fleet battles above them and Passik and her fighters attempt to hold off the basilisk droids, Revan and some of her best Jedi are down here. She prays the fight overhead disguised their landing; if the Mandalorians know they’re planetside, then all this secrecy was for nothing. Eres III isn’t the swampy jungle that Mimban was three months earlier; if they aren’t careful, Mandalorian scanners will pick them up from miles off.

Aside from her, Alek, and Mireya, the rest of the team is made up of a quartet of Republic officers, all equipped with jetpacks and top-of-the-line gear to keep up with the Jedi, and another two of the Revanchists, a master-padawan pair. The padawan, a rangy human boy named Sonn, is a tech expert and has already rigged up a sensor system as they all haul out their speeders, and his master is one of the Jedi Revan has trusted with combat training; Revan will need their skills for this.

Their speeders are newly requisitioned from Coruscant, top-of-the-line models intended for stealth and speed. Revan prays they hold up in their first field test.

The Xoxin plains of Eres III are little-known but highly prized. The flammable mineral covers the planet in huge sheets separated by thin stretches of barren desert; in raw form, a tiny amount will burn for hours, but when refined, it becomes a noxious gas that can kill a standard humanoid in less than a minute. The Mandalorians’ masks would protect them, and the Force can sustain a Jedi for long enough to escape, but ordinary Republic soldiers would be dead before they knew what was happening. If Mandalore releases refined Xoxin on a battlefield, he will win that battle. He could win far more victories than Revan will allow him; toxin in a ship’s vents, swirling air in a Republic compound, even canisters in open air would all prove deadly. No wonder their fleet is fighting with such vicious determination above the planet. Eres III could win the war in weeks. Revan will not let that happen. This war is hers to win, and she will not allow Mandalore the Ultimate to gain a foothold here.

The speeders skate over the crusts of darkened Xoxin, leaving flaking trails in their wake. Hopefully Sonn’s signal jammers will prevent detection long enough for them to get within distance of the blip on the map Revan has marked as the probable site of the Mandalorian compound. Then comes the easy part; her soldiers are well-trained and well-armed, and breaking into a base won’t present too much of a challenge, or so Revan hopes. If it does, they’re on their own. No one can spare aid or weaponry from the upper atmosphere.

Nine people. Mireya is speaking quietly into her commlink as she drives just ahead—probably speaking with the _Basilisk_ in an attempt to coordinate some move even from down here. Alek’s speeder is just behind Revan’s, her ever-present right hand. Sonn’s master, Master Der, takes up the rear, while Sonn himself is the head of the group and the soldiers are arrayed behind him. They may be the best of Revan’s forces, but for a moment, she thinks she should have listened to the low, persistent warning of the Force when she stepped aboard her landing shuttle.

Today will not be a good day. Revan knows that with all the certainty her body possesses. But the deaths have to be worth stopping the Mandalorians. There is no other option.

Revan’s black robes are stained grey with dust when they eventually crest a low ridge and see a low shape breaking up the flatly rolling horizon. Revan motions for them to halt and asks Sonn what he can scan from such a distance. Not much, as it turns out; several life signs, but no major weapons installments and no shields. These Mandalorians think they’re unbeatable out here; Revan will prove them wrong.

Her strategy is simple; they will attack at a single point and break in, then split up once inside the compound. Teams of two will make their way to the interior, where they have half a chance of finding out what these Mandalorians are up to. A few warriors per person and they’ll be fine. Revan has won against worse odds.

Revan finds no difficulty in finding the guards along the compound’s wall. Whoever is in command here, they are clearly smart enough to order them to travel in pairs, and at the first sight of the approaching speeders now spread out in formation with Revan at their head, a shout goes up and the Mandalorians take up defensive positions on the wall. Revan grits her teeth and lets her speeder skid to a halt below them, flipping backwards off of it and sending the first volley of blaster bolts back at the warriors who shot them with a cluster of lightning-quick movements. Her blades are humming in her hands when she finally lands, and she is grinning behind her mask’s blank front.

A quick flash of hand signals—her own, the ones she’s specialized for use among her Revanchists and their forces—has the soldiers spreading out. Their sniper takes up his position behind them and starts firing, and the gathering crowd of Mandalorians on the wall above them return the favor. They’re pinned down out here, with no chance of getting anywhere when the Mandalorians are firing so heavily.

Another few blaster bolts pop against her blades and she throws out a gesture to either side. The soldiers nod; one peels off from either side and begins to creep out into the open. Just as Revan expected, the Mandalorians turn to concentrate fire on each of them.

One goes down screaming. A shot blows open a Mando’s throat and Revan’s sniper checks his gun again. Another Mandalorian dies, and they’ve caught on now.

The second soldier drops. Revan feels him fade and feels the first as her lifeblood spills out; she won’t last long. Their sacrifice has to count.

 _Plan?_ Mireya signs. Her shining green blade slices through the air; the opposing end kicks up a cloud of charcoal-colored dust.

 _Up,_ Revan replies.

“Get ready to go,” she hisses at the other soldiers and Jedi look at her. “Straight through.”

She launches before they can say a word. The Force carries her into the midst of their enemies; a pair of Mandalorians tumble to the ground, lifeless, though more soon take their places. Mireya is the second to land, the end of her pike sending one off the wall and crushing another’s leg with a blow that audibly shatters bone. Alek hits on her other side. Sonn and Der soon join him, and the remaining two soldiers on their jetpacks are firing as they rise from the ground.

By the time Revan breaks through the Mandalorians’ block, her soldiers are dead, one blown out of the air by a grenade and the final, the sniper, shot as he reloaded his weapon. She felt them both die, not that it changed anything. The mission is down to her and her Jedi now.

They cannot stay together inside the compound. Too many Jedi all at once will bring the Mandalorians down on their heads, so Revan splits them up. Sonn and his master take the shortest route to the center of the compound, instructed to pick up as much information as they can along the way. Mireya volunteers to go alone along the corridor that reads as the most abandoned. Revan and Alek head along the third.

“Good luck, and Force be with you,” Mireya says solemnly, saluting the others with her lightsaber. Revan nods, and the girl vanishes into the corridor. Sonn and Der are next, leaving Alek and Revan standing alone in the hall.

“Here goes nothing,” Alek says ruefully. Revan doesn’t bother assuring him that things will turn out alright.

The longer they go without spotting Mandalorians, the more Revan’s unease grows. The strangely empty hallway fills her with unease. Mandalorians should be flooding it, given their perimeter breach. Enemies should have come down on their heads minutes ago. Yet they’ve only encountered a lone figure so far, and Alek killed him before he could shout for help.

Hazy daylight flares up ahead. They have reached the courtyard, the compound’s center. If Mandalorians are here at all, this is where they will be. Revan casts her senses out and smiles; she can feel several of them clustered together, and her Jedi are steadily making their way towards them.

Only when Revan bursts from the corridor with her sabers blazing, the courtyard is empty. She spins around and reaches out in a fevered attempt to feel the Mandalorians but is only met with empty air. No one is waiting for them, not anymore. Force-imbued warning sounds in her ears.

Somewhere deep within the compound, Revan hears someone scream. She turns to face the noise, only to hear durasteel strike together as the hall she and Alek just emerged from slams closed. Across the courtyard, the second door seals, leaving only one entrance. Revan has taken all of three steps towards it when Master Der stumbles from the murky corridor and that door shuts as well.

Sith hells, it was a trap from the beginning, and now she’s lost Sonn and Mireya. She swears under her breath and glances around, but no one else emerges. No Mandalorians, nor either of her missing Jedi. It’s just the three of them.

The triplet sound of boots hitting the ground sends Revan spinning around once more. A trio of beskar-armored Mandalorians—full suits of it, not a few pieces, which bodes ill for them—slam into the stone in front of Der like a pack of wolves. Their jetpacks are still trailing smoke when they attack him; Revan moves to help, only for another few to drop from the sky and surround her. They split off, most attacking Alek, while three remain around Revan.

On any other day, those odds would be in Revan’s favor. Today, against this much beskar and Mandalore-trained warriors, she is more cautious. Though they circle her, however, they refrain from attacking and stay just out of range of her lightsabers.

Somewhere high above, a door slams open. Revan catches Sonn’s harried presence and several unfamiliar ones; when she cranes her head to look up, she sees more beskar as a helmetless Mandalorian, her face crossed with scars, hauls Sonn behind her. Guards surround her, and by the reverence of the warriors down here, this woman is their leader.

The commander, whose sigil marks her as Clan Vizsla (and Revan knows all their important clans by now, Ordo and Fett and Vizsla and a hundred others, so the jagged, three-lined symbol painted on her pauldron is familiar), shoves Sonn forward in a vicious motion. Master Der shouts, but he himself is pinned by Vizsla fighters, and another trio on jetpacks has just appeared over the stronghold’s duracrete wall. Mireya has yet to reappear, though when Revan casts her senses out she can feel her in a nearby corridor fighting her own set of warriors. Alek is halfway across the courtyard frantically fighting off at least four Mandalorians, and Revan can’t even hold still with the three circling her.

Vizsla shouts something in Mando’a and the three around Revan back down, surrounding her in a semicircle. The open point faces the commander and Sonn, now on his knees, his lightsaber clutched in a beskar gauntlet.

“You Jedi and your weapons,” Vizsla muses, twirling it around and around between her fingers. Sonn’s frantic eyes flicker towards it, but Vizsla’s hand on his shoulder keeps him pinned as strongly as his fear does.

“Let him go,” Revan snarls. She whips one saber in front of her in a blur of blue and gold.

“I’m not going to do that, _Revan,_ ” Vizsla sneers. In her mouth, Revan’s name sounds like a title. Like a curse.

“He’s a child. He has nothing to do with any of this.”

Vizsla tilts her head to the side to look at Sonn.  
“He chose to fight with you. A Revanchist, isn’t that what your _jetiise_ call themselves? He is old enough to hold a weapon and fight with it. Means he’s old enough to die for a cause. Our children can shoot a blaster by the time they’re two; you and your _jetii’kade_ aren’t much different, are you?”

Revan bares her teeth behind the mask. “Jedi are _nothing_ like Mandalorians. You think we’d commit genocides for glory? That we’d kill whole worlds just to see if we could? We’re peacekeepers, not warlords.”

Vizsla tips back her head and laughs. The throaty noise startles Revan enough that the point of her saber begins to waver.

“Oh, you poor, blind child,” Vizsla says, almost tenderly. “You are more like Mandalore than half his army.”

And she presses the emitter of Sonn’s lightsaber to his neck and ignites it.

Revan doesn’t scream. She doesn’t make a sound as Sonn’s life flickers out, as Vizsla shoves him from the rooftop and as his body tumbles boneless to strike the courtyard. His master shouts; Revan hears the frantic movements of his lightsaber, and she hears how they grow weaker and more wild until some weapon finds a weak point. She feels him die across the courtyard.

She doesn’t move. She looks Vizsla in the eyes as the points of her lightsabers fizz against the dirt, as Vizsla raises her comm and sends out a quiet order. The Force is a tempest roaring in her ears and Revan is still.

“I am going to kill you,” she says, so soft she isn’t sure the commander can hear her. It is not a threat. This is a promise to the dead bodies of the soldiers who bled out to get them in here. This is a promise to Sonn and his master, nothing more than broken shells.

And Revan _shatters._

A lightsaber is the favored weapon of a Jedi. It is not their only weapon.

She clenches her fist. The Mandalorians around her die.

Vizsla stops smiling as Revan takes a step towards her. She doesn’t remember disengaging her lightsabers, but the hilts are hanging on her belt now, kyber crystals singing a low, angry song.

She steps past the nearest body. Around her, the world is silent, even as Alek and Mireya are fighting for their lives. Wrath roars in her ears and twists cold inside her with all the fury of a tempest, drowning out everything but Vizsla and her and the way her fingers tighten around empty air.

One of Vizsla’s guards aims a blaster at her head. She deflects it with a wave of her hand and does not look away. When the second shot comes, this time from Vizsla herself, Revan does not divert its course; she stretches out her hand and stops it in midair, the blue streak hovering a foot from her mask. She wonders very briefly how she must look to Vizsla as the light reflects off the visor, and then she lets the bolt shatter uselessly against the dirt behind her as she steps around it.

The rooftop is not such a long way off the ground, not with the rage simmering low in Revan’s belly. She lands in a crouch and stretches to her full height, stares across at Vizsla and her blaster. She lets her cloak drop to the ground and lifts her offhand saber from her belt, igniting it in a familiar _crack-hiss_. No Jar’Kai forms, not now, just anger and the fire in her veins.

Vizsla barely manages to lift a bracer high enough to block Revan’s heavy swing. Her blade skitters off the beskar in a shower of sparks; Vizsla grins a savage smile and aims a shot at Revan’s stomach. She jerks the blaster to the side with a twist of her fingers and drops back to circle Vizsla.

“You Jedi,” she says, pulling a vibroblade out of a hidden sheath and tapping it against a bracer. “Always so certain of your victories. How is that going to help you when Eres is burning?”  
When Revan says nothing, she laughs again.

“You didn’t think we came to _take_ the Xoxin, did you? Oh, this is priceless. Why use gas to kill you all when we can meet you on a battlefield? We came to set it on fire, commander, and that’s what my _vode_ have just done. Enjoy your burning wasteland.”

When Revan looks out at the horizon, it’s smoke-filled and shimmering with heat. She stretches out her senses and feels nothing but destruction.

Revan slams her foot into Vizsla’s leg and strikes low; this time, the lightsaber finds a weak point in her armor and slices through cloth to reach her skin. Despite the new pain along her leg, she is satisfied.

“What, no tricks?” Vizsla taunts. “You’re not going to crush me in my armor like you did to them down there?” She gestures with her blaster over the roof’s edge, and her smile has returned.

“I don’t need to.” Revan’s voice is low. She ignites her second saber and crosses them together; Vizsla settles down into a defensive stance and fires off another round of blaster shots. None of them touch Revan; her fury is a shield around her, lightsabers flashing faster than even she can see them.

Vizsla is strong and as tall as Revan is, but the Force is at Revan’s back. She slams her lightsabers into Vizsla’s armor, enough to push her back, dodges the returning blow and a short burst of flames that almost catch her robes alight. She’s caught Vizsla’s vibroblade; not beskar, but resistant nonetheless, enough that when she leans into her sabers, Vizsla’s boot slips back.

Vizsla’s beskar-coated fist slams into her stomach hard enough that she gasps, lightsabers shutting off with a crack. She can feel a bruise already spreading, can feel the places where the gauntlet’s edges have scraped shallow cuts in her skin, but pain means nothing. Pain can be power, if she knows how to use it.

She straightens up as best she can, though her stomach muscles are screaming in protest, and hefts her sabers. A wave of nausea strikes her, and Vizsla grins as Revan’s chest heaves.

“So much for the Supreme Commander,” she says. Every movement Revan makes sends a jolt through her; though she can lift her lightsabers, she can’t quite move them fast enough to block another blow, this time to her head. Her vision swims.

Vizsla lifts her vibroblade and goes to drive it home.

 _No,_ Revan’s mind snarls.

Vizsla’s blade stops in midair, the point hovering near Revan’s throat. All her sure satisfaction, all her Mandalorian arrogance—they begin to drain away as her momentum halts. She is _afraid,_ Revan realizes, and some dark place within her chest smiles at the thought. Beneath her beskar armor, she struggles to loosen the invisible grip freezing her in place, and for a moment, the only sound is the wind howling around them. In that desolate silence, Revan summons every ounce of fury in her blood, wraps herself in the Force, strengthens her aching muscles and bruised bones.

The blade shatters.

And as the shards fall like hail around her, she presses her lightsaber to Vizsla’s throat, tastes the fear tainting the Force and watches it flash behind the Mandalorian’s eyes, and ignites the blade in a burst of blue and gold.

Vizsla’s life signature blinks out.

“Revan?” It’s not Alek’s voice calling her like she expected; when she turns, choking back nausea, Mireya is silhouetted in a fractured doorway, blood staining her robes and lightsaber pike extended. She looks—she looks terrified.

Revan sags against a nearby wall as her rage abandons her, leaving only pain in its wake. Her head is pounding against her skull, she can’t straighten without twin bolts of nausea and agony setting her stomach on fire, and her foot no longer holds her weight. There is no one watching, no one alive in the compound besides Alek and Mireya. She could let herself drop.

She doesn’t. She pushes off the wall with a shaky hand and limps to the edge of the roof, then jumps to the ground, ignoring the way she almost— _almost—_ stumbles. They need to leave. Outside the walls, flames are spreading; before long, most of this region will be engulfed.

A hand touches her elbow, and Alek says her name, asks if she’s alright.

“Let’s go,” she bites out. She doesn’t say another word until they reach their landing zone and climb aboard their shuttle; Mireya pilots while Alek applies kolto to both their wounds. Despite the concern she can feel from him, she doesn’t take her mask off, just sits in silence and stares at the opposing wall.

Her entire strike team is dead. _Sonn_ , a child even younger than Mireya, is dead, and for what? They couldn’t stop the Mandalorians. Eres III is burning below them, and Jedi are dead, and Revan was so _angry_ she killed three people with a single motion of her hand.

She has always been connected to the Force more strongly than many of her peers. And so when Revan feels two Jedi die, when that rage fuels her strongly enough to kill with the Force—

She bears it alone.

She bears those deaths as she briefs her flagship, barely able to hold herself upright without drawing on the Force. She holds that pain inside her as she addresses her fleet’s victory, as the Mandalorian ships run. She keeps herself together long enough to make it back to her quarters and drop onto the edge of her bed.

She is fine. She is _fine._ She doesn’t need help.

But her fingers are shaking so badly that she can’t unclasp her mask’s familiar buckles, and even that little failure sends her spinning. Her cheeks are wet beneath the beskar, uncomfortably hot on her cheeks as she tugs on the straps.

Force, she can’t even get her own mask off.

 _Alek._ All she has to do is say his name into the Force; she can sense him across the ship, can feel the way he freezes and drops whatever he’s doing. The knock on her door comes after an eternity of sitting in silence staring through the mask’s steadily-blurring visor. She doesn’t look up, just waves her hand and unlocks it, lets him in (and she knows it’s Alek without looking, knows his steady presence, knows the way his Force signature curls around the edges of hers and curbs the wave of panic just a little, just enough that she can sit up straight).

“What happened?” he asks too softly.

“I—“ She chokes up before she can finish, unable to force the words past the lump in her throat.

She projects what she can: the flash of a humming green blade, Sonn’s wide, terrified eyes, the way his throat had burned, his _fear,_ and knowing that it was _her fault,_ that she’d watched a child die for nothing—

She held herself together long enough to make it back here. She can’t do it anymore.

Alek kneels silently and curls a hand around the back of her neck, presses his forehead to the mask.

 _I’m here._ It’s words, it’s a feeling, it’s _Alek._ More tears fall; she can’t stop them, can’t even wipe them from her face.

Something clinks near her ear, and she realizes that Alek is undoing the mask’s restraints. His hands aren’t shaking like hers; he makes quick work of the buckles and pulls the mask away from her skin. Cool air hits her; she flinches, then forces herself to hold still. Alek’s thumb brushes across her cheek. Though he’s set the mask off to the side, one hand is still cradling her face, and _Force_ , she’s missed the touch of skin.

“Hey,” he murmurs, voice tinged with concern. “Revan. Look at me, okay? Breathe.”

She knows the exercises. In and hold and out, until the tears have stopped falling and her chest isn’t so heavy, until her focus shifts from the battle back to Alek and the hand still holding her face.

 _I’ve seen Jedi die before, but he was so young,_ she says; even mentally, her voice sounds hoarse. _And Vizsla killed him for nothing._

“It wasn’t your fault,” Alek murmurs. “There was nothing you could do.”

She _knows._ Of course she knows. But that doesn’t stop the guilt (and it’s not about the guilt, not really; it’s about that _fury_ in her gut and how it felt to end three lives in seconds, how easily she pressed her lightsaber to Vizsla’s neck and ignited it). Alek is entwined enough with her that he understands. She knows he does; his emotions are hers, and hers are his, and it takes all she has in her to block him out when she has to.

She curls a hand around his wrist and clings to the points of contact, even as he raises his other hand and curls it around the side of her face.

“Hey,” he says again, only there’s something ragged in his voice as he presses his forehead to hers. _I’ve got you._

She holds on to the bright corona of his presence in the Force and lets her tumultuous emotions break and still against his calm. He’s done this ever since they were padawans; whenever she’s out of her head and spiraling, he’s there, an unshakable presence at her side. Alek is always at her side, no matter what she does. And when it’s him who can’t run from his nightmares and his guilt, she does the same for him.

It’s always been the two of them. That’s all they’ve ever needed.

She can’t have eternity, but she can have this moment.

Alek has always meant comfort to her and she needs that, needs _him,_ needs her best friend so for a minute she can forget how it felt to crush three people’s heads inside their armor with half a gesture and the way two Jedi dying resonated in her mind. He is the only person in the galaxy who understands her— _really_ understands her—and he can make it right.

The hand not clutching Alek’s wrist reaches up and wraps around the back of his neck. His breath hitches; Revan catches a tendril of confusion and something bright and fragile fluttering in the Force. For a moment, they hover there, just the two of them, foreheads leaning together, and then she leans forward just enough to close the gap and press her lips against his in a soft, desperate gesture.

It feels like home, like the sun on Dantooine, like everything Revan has forgotten in the darkness of the war, and she sinks into it readily.

Though deep down she’d known he wouldn’t, some part of her is still surprised that Alek doesn’t pull away, just clings tighter to her. His fingers trace the edge of her jaw, the wisps of hair that have escaped her braid, the corner of her lips as he finally leans back.

“Revan, talk to me. Tell me you know what you’re doing.” He sounds pained as he asks the question, as if there’s a chance she’ll say no, push him away, retreat to isolated safety.

“Of course I do,” she answers softly.

“Why, then?”

How can she tell Alek that he’s part of her, that they know each other as well as they know themselves? And even if she isn’t sure exactly what he is to her now—partner, second-in-command, friend, all the grey areas in between—he is still the only person who can see into her soul.

“It’s you,” she says at last. This time, he is the one who leans in.

When Revan finally falls asleep, Alek is curled around her, a shield against the war. Just for the night. Just long enough that she won’t dream of power and fury and the dead.

Revan is used to waking up tangled in her blankets and sweating from some unremembered nightmare. For weeks after Razari, she would dream of the genesis of fire as the _Basilisk_ razed it to the ground, but now she isn’t sure how long she would hesitate before giving that order again. Sacrifices for victories. In this war, the tradeoff isn’t hard, not like it used to be.

But Eres III isn’t Razari, isn’t a victory. Death is the only thing it will ever represent.

And so she isn’t surprised that she wakes up with half-conscious fear still clinging to her skin. Despite Alek’s still-sleeping form next to her and the cool edges of the bond, her sleep was shadowed with fear and pain, busts of lightsabers and the smell of burning flesh and the _anger_ that still chills her even now. She recalls other things, darker things, a laugh like ice and a wave of death.

The Force warned her of Eres before she landed. This is her punishment.

Jedi do not fight with anger in their hearts, nor do they kill if they have other options. They do not use their rage and their pain and the memory of their dead compatriots to hold their opponents in place long enough to kill them. And they do not kiss their best friends in a desperate attempt to reassure themselves that they are alive.

Force, she’s a mess right now.

She needs to get up. She needs to change into robes that don't smell like day-old smoke and blood. She needs to pretend to hold herself together in front of the Chancellor as he gets his status reports. She needs to do a number of things; she is Supreme Commander, after all, and the war is far from over.

But Alek's arm is wrapped around her and the lights of hyperspace are still flashing across her quarters and she doesn't want to move. Someone else can run her ship for a few hours. She can bear the discomfort of her robes digging into her side if it means she won't have to leave this warmth.

"Stop thinking so loud," Alek murmurs into the back of her neck. The soft exhale relaxes her more than it should, and she sighs as she twists around to check her comms. Nothing urgent: a few enquiries, some concerned messages from her command staff, and one terse order from Captain Passik to buy her pilots a few rounds of drinks and some new engines. She doesn’t need to leave, not yet. 

It is with very little guilt that she sends a comm to Mireya and falls back asleep.

The next time she wakes up, the chrono set into her wall tells her that it’s almost noon. Alek is gone; though it isn’t entirely unexpected, it stings more than it should. She sends out a questioning pulse in the bond to find that he’s attending a debriefing in her place.

Gods, she loves him. Not—not in the romantic sense, it’s not like that (Jedi don’t _do_ that sort of thing anyway). He’s always been at her side, a part of her that she can never leave behind. Who else would fabricate some excuse about her injuries to get her a few extra hours of sleep? Who else could she argue with on the _Basilisk’s_ bridge, standing in silence as words fly between their minds? No one trusts her like he does, and he’s always been the only one Revan fully trusts in turn.

So of course she loves him, the same way she’s always loved him. And even if her feelings had changed—which they haven’t—she has bigger issues. She has a war to win.

Eventually, she manages to dig up a robe that isn’t streaked with grime or blood or kolto—or, in one case, foul-smelling mud from last week’s campaign. She cleans up as best she can, scrubbing kolto gel from where it’s crusted on her side, and slips it on. Pants, robes, belt with its saber clips, then the inner hood to keep her hair tucked away. Mask, boots, gloves; as each new layer goes on, she regains some modicum of strength. At last, she fastens her cloak around her shoulders. When she leaves her quarters, she is Supreme Commander Revan once more.

The bridge is crowded with the usual daytime crew. A map of a sector Revan doesn’t immediately recognize has been pulled up on the holotable; Mireya leans on the terminal, staring deep into the blue light, though she spares Revan a smile and a wave when she enters. Alek, too, is leaning against a nearby support beam; he smiles, more subdued than usual, and waves her over. Revan is inordinately relieved that he is acting no different than before. After last night, the fear of some delayed reaction has stuck fast to her heart, but it’s clear that nothing has changed between them. She shakes off its last vestiges and strides over to join them.

“Where to next?” she asks. Open space glimmers with light outside the viewport.

“Althir,” Alek answers, and the future stretches out before them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Denial: The Chapter. In other words, Revan is absolutely lying to herself.  
> It was very fun to write her succumbing to the Dark for a short fight. She's getting closer and closer to a place where Malachor could happen, but right now they're about halfway through the war, so she hasn't quite reached that point yet.  
> I upped the chapter count by one because I miscalculated slightly and had to remedy that, so here we are, still about halfway through the fic. Enjoy!


	6. Hiraeth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Unmasked, naked before the eyes of the Force, she watches her face reflected in transparisteel. Light flashes beyond it, and for a moment, she is haloed in white like a saint of ancient legends, some martyr for a long-forgotten cause._   
>  _The light dies, and she is still Revan, brown-skinned, grey-eyed Revan. Just a Jedi, nothing more._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hiraeth (n): a deep longing for a home one cannot return to, a home that might never have existed.

The last time Arren Kae met Revan, it was to tell her goodbye as Revan walked away from Dantooine. Now, Revan scarcely recognizes the Jedi who stands in the _Basilisk’s_ hangar bay. Her pale hair hangs limp before her face, and her usual brown and golden robes are worn and dirty. She looks _old,_ older than her years. The war has aged her by a decade.

And the Jedi, her oldest and only home, have cast her out.

“Master,” Revan says cautiously. As calm as Arren Kae might seem, she always has a plan, and Revan does not yet know the one she is operating off of.

“My dear former padawan,” Master Arren replies tiredly. Her attempt at a smile fails miserably.

“Why have you come to us now? After what the Jedi did…”

A flash of something passes across her face too quickly for Revan to read.

“You turned your back on the High Council, Revan, as they have now turned their backs on me. I have come to join your cause.”  
“And what of your lover and child?” Alek asks, voice sharp. Revan shoots him a look and gives him a mental prod; he has been against this from the start. _If she can’t even be loyal to the Jedi, how do you expect her to be loyal to us?_ he had asked the night they received her comm, but how could Revan turn away her old master? The Jedi in their towers and temples and enclaves, hiding away as people bled and died on battlefields the galaxy over, have no right to pass judgement on anyone. Let them pick up their lightsabers and join the fray for once.

Those are the lessons that Master Arren taught her, after all. How to fight and how to _win._ How to make a stand when needed. Despite her master’s flowing speeches, the sentiments behind them have always been as hard and unyielding as iron.

“My lover and child, general, are safe on Eshan. They are also irrelevant to the discussion at hand.”

“Are they? What secrets are you still clinging to?”

“Can you truly say you have no secrets, then?”

“Enough,” Revan snaps before Alek can respond. The anger curling under his skin puzzles her, and the source of this newfound enmity eludes her. She doesn’t have time to deal with it. “Master Arren, you’ll be escorted to rooms on the _Basilisk_ for the time being. If you choose to fight with us, you’ll be assigned to a ship to fight with the other Revanchists.”

Arren nods.

“Thank you for your hospitality, Revan. I shall leave you to your command.” She brushes past Revan with a smile and greets the escort Revan has ordered to bring her to her quarters.

 _I need to review our strategy,_ Alek says, and leaves without another word. Revan watches him leave until he turns a corner and is gone. Arren Kae isn’t the only thing putting him on edge. The _Basilisk_ has been ordered to the Outer Rim once more, a planet called Quelii in a sector of the same name. Revan hadn’t recognized it at first, but Alek had frozen when the Supreme Chancellor offered up the name.

Quelii is Alek’s homeworld, and their next battle is set to be suspended over its surface. Little wonder he’s more tense than Revan has ever seen him.

Alek stays holed up planning strategies with Mireya in the bowels of the ship for several hours, then returns to pace the bridge. Revan gives him space, but his temper seems to fade as time wears on. Alek is never very long to anger, not like Revan can be. Eventually, he settles down with a sigh and offers Revan a game of dejarik. The apology for earlier is unspoken but present, and Revan accepts the game gladly, then promptly beats him three times in a row. By the end of it, they’re both laughing. Revan’s victories in dejarik are as sure as Alek’s would be in sabacc (Revan insists he cheats and refuses to play him; he categorically denies it, but he’s cleaned most of the ship out of their savings).

They have managed to settle back into easy friendship when Revan returns to her rooms that night—earlier than usual, but late enough that she is startled to hear her comm ring shrilly. Master Arren’s face pops up when she answers it, and the master greets her warmly.

 _“Revan, I was hoping you’d be around to answer,”_ she says.

“What’s happening? Is everything alright?”

Master Arren smiles.

_“Everything is fine. I simply wished to talk to you. Tell me about your command and what you’ve been doing.”_

With a sigh, Revan does. Speaking to her master brings her back to her years as a padawan. After every mission, she and her master would go over all her actions and study what she could learn from the mission itself. Now, even as she runs an entire army, she is reminded of afternoons seated on the edge of her bunk aboard a Jedi-issued transport going over what she could have done better.

 _“I am proud of all you’ve accomplished,”_ Master Arren says once Revan has finished talking. _“You have done what other Jedi could not and chosen to fight when a stand must be made. I trained you well, young one.”_

“Thank you, master. For everything. Your training has taught me much about the Force and how to wield it.”

Talking to Arren Kae again is still novel to Revan. As their conversation continues from duty to memories to old debates on the nature of the Force, the weight of years begins to lift from Revan’s chest and a new one settles into place. Revan likes her old master, but all these years-old arguments remind her of her time as a padawan. She always felt helpless back then when the masters used to argue about things like these, and being part of the discussion rather than on its fringes does little to help. Even when the conversation turns to more mundane topics and when Master Arren hangs up after nearly an hour, Revan is stuck back on Dantooine. She loved her home and still does, but not every memory is a good one, and not every disagreement back then came from a simple debate over the Force or the Jedi code.

 _Revan Adarii will be the downfall of us all._ In the darkness of the night, with Arren Kae sleeping three decks below, Vrook’s words haunt Revan. For years, she has shoved them to the back of her mind as the bitter result of a man who has always hated her, but now, when she dreams of the Force dying around her, of so much endless suffering, she cannot help but hesitate. She walks a razor-sharp line in this war; she must be careful if she doesn’t want to fall.

Revan sleeps, and Revan dreams.

She is watching a figure standing on the _Basilisk’s_ bridge as green light ignites it, and death is riding on its heels. Revan’s shields are strong enough to hold back Jedi masters. The pain rips through them before she can blink. Living Force, this is the pain of a galaxy dying, the pain of her _failure._

_THIS IS YOUR WEAKNESS._

She groans, reaching for the shredded tendrils of her power, reaching for any semblance of strength. She knows this voice like some half-forgotten memory, and the Force is wailing inside her as she cries out.

_YOU CANNOT SUCCEED, REVAN._

And darkness flashes before her eyes. Rain and the green surface of an unfamiliar world, a cloaked figure standing still in an echoing stone hall, the pure ringing of beskar hitting the floor as it drops from limp fingers, as the shape tosses back the hood of its cloak and shows its face—

Her face, her own, grey eyes wide as she stares around her—and her eyes haven’t always been that grey, that dark and empty, and she _knows this vision—_

The Force howls and space opens up; a planet dies, and Revan feels every person on its surface as it falls, and a ship is burning and she needs to know _why—_

_YOU WILL NOT STOP WHAT IS TO COME._

_I have to,_ says some desperate part of her, all that death still clinging to her, the air a void around her as she screams. Her future will not be ashes and blood and so much pain. She must be strong enough to stop this.

The war will end in death if she cannot make the right choices. This has always been her future. She will not let the galaxy bleed.

And the voice inside her skull laughs.

She wakes up clutching her lightsabers in trembling hands. These days, she sleeps with them every night, but even the presence of her kyber crystals cannot shake her unease. She cannot remember all the vision, just as she cannot remember any of them, but enough remains. If she loses the war, more people will die than she can possibly imagine.

She _has_ to win. Any cost will be worth preventing that.

When she finally rubs a hand over her face and sits up, she is alone in her quarters. For half a moment, panic chokes her; she is so unused to being alone now, and even the weight of the bond tying her to Alek does little to ease her.

Shadows dance in the corner of her room. They are not real. The voice in her head is not real. Her visions…

Her visions will not be real if she does not let them. This is her vow.

She barely stops herself from reaching out to Alek in the Force. On any other day, she might have, but he has been distant for days now, and she doesn’t feel like recounting the fractured fragments of the dream she still remembers. Maybe later, but not when her ribs still ache from half-remembered nightmares.

Even if Alek spends more nights in her quarters than his own these days, he isn’t always with her. She can’t always rely on whatever respite he can provide her. She is Supreme Commander; she will not break in front of her army.

They haven’t talked about what happened after Eres III. They also haven’t talked about what happened three days later when Revan came limping back from a skirmish and Alek kissed her like a drowning man looking for air. They don’t talk about this unnameable thing hovering between them.

An unspoken promise lies in those moments. _After the war_ , when they don’t have to fight to survive, when Revan doesn’t wake up choking on the taste of dust and fury, when she isn’t the Supreme Commander, when Alek isn’t leading the Revanchists into battle, when they don’t spend every battle trying to survive and Revan isn’t holding back her power so she doesn’t flatten half a battlefield with the force of her wrath.

 _After the war._ When Revan might allow herself to feel something more than guilt. She isn’t sure what Alek is to her or what he will be when they’re not bleeding out for the Republic, but the promise is enough.

After the war, they can talk and they won’t be afraid. Hells, after the war, they’ll be free. They can go back to Dantooine. Not to the Enclave, not yet, but the planet is large and so very open. There are abandoned places where power swirls, where even the Jedi might not find them. Just the two of them, alone in the grasses like they’re the pair of teenagers that stole speeders for the night and ran until the Enclave was out of sight and they couldn’t feel its echo.

They could live. Force, they could live. Alek has always been the only one Revan needs; that’s never going to change. 

She closes her eyes. For a moment, she can taste the honey-sweet air of Dantooine, can feel the gentle brush of grass on her fingertips. The memory is painful in a way only the best ones are. She turned her back on their council, on the High Council, on everything she knew, but Dantooine is and always will be home. After the war, she _will_ come back to it.

A meteor flares outside her window and she swallows, abruptly feeling a lump in her throat. Force, she shouldn’t be this choked up about one memory, but tears are gathering in the corners of her eyes regardless of her will.

Unmasked, naked before the eyes of the Force, she watches her face reflected in transparisteel. Light flashes beyond it, and for a moment, she is haloed in white like a saint of ancient legends, some martyr for a long-forgotten cause.

The light dies, and she is still Revan, brown-skinned, grey-eyed Revan. Just a Jedi, nothing more.

She brushes the tears from her eyes and exhales slowly. Come morning, Tol Cressa will send her the final report. By afternoon, they will reach Quelii, and Revan will launch her fleet into yet another battle. She will sow destruction and reap the deaths of Mandalorians as a reward.

Revan steels herself, clenching her hands into fists, and rises to her feet. The transparisteel hallows her image; her loose sleeping robes are gilded in white fire, hair edged with silver, eyes shining like stars.

She will not be weak ever again. She will be a victor.

She never sets foot on Quelii’s surface. Though the Mandalorians did land there years ago, those paltry forces are nothing compared to the fleet hanging above the planet. Cassus Fett is here; she knows it with a deadly certainty. She recognizes his tactics with their familiar strengths and weaknesses. By now, almost two years into the war, Fett’s formations are almost friendly to her, as much as she might hate the man himself. It gives her a chance to test some new tactics as the Mandalorian ships fan out and take up their positions.

Mandalore the Ultimate is not within this fleet (he always manages to slip from Revan’s grasp, always manages to vanish at the last minute), but that doesn’t matter anymore. Fett is enough.

Revan’s command crew—Mireya, Alek, Captain Passik—are all standing on the bridge when a young comm officer looks up, the tips of his montrals darkening with something that tastes like shock in the Force.

“Sir? Commander? Uh, we have an enemy ship attempting to hail us,” he says. The boy is new, a replacement for a tech who was blown into space during the last battle, and he still isn’t used to some of the less common occurrences of Revan’s command.

“Patch them through,” she orders tiredly. It’ll be Fett or one of his other generals; she’s heard a new name lately, some son of Clan Ordo who’s been heading the basilisk droids for a few battles now, and a few old, familiar faces have managed to resurface over the months.

And indeed, the mask that flickers to life on the holoterminal is Cassus Fett.

“Aren’t you tired of losing to me?” she asks him conversationally. “Really, it’s getting somewhat embarrassing.”

Passik chokes on a sip of caf.

 _“This planet will not be yours, Revan. You’ve given us the fight we asked for, but it’s time to give up. You think you can take us on,_ jetii? _One against an army; not even a_ Mando’ad _would take those odds.”_

She bares her teeth at him, though the savage gesture is invisible.

“My fleet has yours dead to rights, Fett.” She omits the _you karking Sith-damned hut’uun_ that she wants to say to him and twitches her fingers where they are curled behind her back. Mireya shifts subtly and taps a hand against her crossed arm.

Deep within the fleet, her fighters have started to move. She prays this will keep Fett occupied until they get into place.

Fett laughs, an ugly sound. _“You’re awfully arrogant, kid. We break that out of our warriors before it kills them. Maybe you should do the same.”_

“Considering how many times we’ve managed to beat your precious warriors, maybe our _arrogance_ is a good thing, Mandalorian,” Alek says from just behind her. He looks up from his terminal and levels Fett with a furious look.

 _“Your betters are talking, boy,”_ Fett snaps.

The bridge falls so silent that the loudest noise is the nearly inaudible humming of the holoterminal.

“What did you just say?” Even _Revan_ doesn’t fully recognize the tone her voice takes, sweet as honey with iron death running beneath it. Fett can stand there as much as he wants, posturing before his failing fleet, fighting a war he’ll lose, but he does _not_ get to stare her second in the eyes and claim that he is superior.

_“Come on, Revan. You might be our equal, but them? This little crew of yours, some child and an untrained alien and that Jedi who does nothing but follow in your steps? Don’t delude yourself. They are nothing compared to you or me.”_

“Listen to me and hear my words, Cassus Fett,” she growls. Cold anger encases her; her hands curl around the edge of the holoterminal in lieu of Fett’s neck. “Ketaris. Lantillies. A thousand other worlds I have wrested from your grip, and you think that this is where I fall? You think that after all I have torn from you, you have the right to stand there and pretend you are _anything_ but dust?”

Fett’s hand comes up to pull at the armor at his throat and Revan narrows her eyes further, pushes her hands into the durasteel terminal.

“Alek is ten times the warrior you will ever be, and he is my _second._ You dare to say that you’re his better? Do you really think I didn’t choose him for his skill? Answer me this, Fett. When I’m not heading my army, when they still manage to grind your beskar into the dirt, who do you think is leading those battles?”

Someone is shouting in the background of Fett’s holo. She doesn’t take the time to listen to their words, just makes a sharp gesture and cuts the connection.

“Passik, give the order,” she barks, turning to the viewing window. “I want to see him bleed.”

The captain’s red skin is pale with surprise, but she opens a channel to her starfighters and sends them out in a tight formation, one of Revan’s newest plans. Passik knows what she’s doing, and though Revan designed the broad strokes of this maneuver, she was the one to fine-tune it. Now, as explosions rock one of the outermost Mandalorian ships, Revan gives the twi’lek a firm nod.

“Get your starfighters spread out among the Mandalorians and tell them to await my orders,” she states. “The rest of you, battle stations. Fett’s not going to wait to strike back.”

Revan is proven correct when, not five minutes later, the _Basilisk_ is rocked by heavy fire from Fett’s flagship. Their shields hold, but the Mandalorian artillery does not cease for almost a minute straight. As it finally peters out, Revan grits her teeth and keys open a comm channel to her own nearby capital ship, the most important in the battle besides the _Basilisk_ itself.

 _“Supreme Commander!”_ Fleet Admiral Karyn Thell, a grim-faced woman who has been in the Republic military since she could hold a blaster, salutes Revan. For a moment, her image wavers as another round of fire shakes her ship.

“Admiral. Status?”

_“We’ve got a few Mando ships headed our way. So far our defenses are holding, but they’re concentrating fire on a few areas; we can’t hold them for long. Shit! Damn, there went one of our cruisers.”_

“How many of theirs can you take out?”

_“We’ve got a few already, and if the fighters can take out the weapons and external generators, we might get some of the heavy cruisers and transports hanging near the edge.”_

“Concentrate on those, then. Passik, get your fighters onto those weapons. Draw them towards Thell’s direction, see how much damage you can do.”

The order goes out. After that, the battle becomes a waiting game. Alek is barking orders for the _Basilisk’s_ crew while Mireya frantically monitors comms and weapons; she has her own cluster of ships to command, and they are deftly weaving in and out, taking Mandalorian ships even as they all flicker out one by one. Revan’s holomap of the battle turns redder and redder the longer she stares at it. This won’t be a long battle, but it will be deadly.

She sends one terse message deep across the fleet, then stands back and scans the field. If Fett takes the bait she’s laid out for him, she can decimate his fleet, but only if he doesn’t realize what she’s doing. Fett knows her tactics by now, and Revan is cynical enough to know that her chance of success isn’t terribly high.

Fett was at Razari, after all. He lost hundreds there. He’s been trying to goad her into another sacrifice like that for months.

 _We’re losing ships._ Alek hasn’t turned from the viewport. Hands clasped behind his back, he is staring out as ships fall apart outside the transparisteel.

_We’ll win._

_I’m not concerned about our victory. I’m concerned about the cost. We’ve already lost hundreds. How many more for a planet that’s practically abandoned?_ Alek’s bitterness is evident. Truth be told, Revan isn’t here because this is a strategic victory. She was simply the closest to Quelii when the orders came through. For Alek, knowing that his home planet is an afterthought…

This won’t be an easy battle. If Revan knew what her own homeworld was, she would likely feel the same, but as it is, she just imagines Dantooine down below instead of the red-orange ball just visible in one corner of the viewport.

“We’ve had more costly victories, Alek,” she answers, forgoing mental communication to speak to him across the bridge. “We were given a job, and I intend to report a victory to the Supreme Chancellor when this is finished.”

Alek shakes his head.

_You would have flinched at this two years ago._

_And what exactly do you want me to do now?_ she snaps. _You can feel them dying, too. I know you can. Should I not have built up calluses against it?_

“Hells, Revan, an acknowledgement would be something!” He spins around to face her, anger written large across his face. Revan knows he disapproves of her tactics sometimes, but he has to understand that this is the cost of war.

“Victory _is_ an acknowledgement!” she bites out. This isn’t the place for an argument; the closest officers are eyeing them with a mix of trepidation and annoyance, and Mireya looks as though she’s about to pull out her lightsaber. She knows that none of them can hear her words or Alek’s from so many feet away, but the conflict is clear enough. They can’t do this in the middle of a battle.

 _No. It’s not,_ Alek says, _and it never has been. Some of us haven’t forgotten about Razari._

Revan stops. No one can tell how frozen she is, not behind the mask and black robes, and she won’t let them.

She spins on her heels to face the weapons officers.

“Fire on these coordinates,” she snaps, sending data with a flick of her fingers. “And someone get me Thell on the line.”

Eventually, Admiral Thell’s face reappears on the holoterminal.

 _“We’re under heavy fire,”_ she manages to get out, though their connection is spotty and she keeps flickering in and out of focus.

“How much longer can you hold out?” Revan is praying with everything she has that _this_ won’t fall apart like everything else.

_“A few minutes if we’re lucky, but if we’re not, I don’t know. Shields are critically low, commander. We need support!”_

Even if Revan had the ships to send aid, she can’t. Fett’s ships aren’t in place yet; the _Basilisk_ can’t hit them from this angle, and Thell’s ship won’t be moving anytime soon.

Sithspit. She needs _five minutes_ and they’ll have their victory, and it won’t be a second Razari.

Something shatters across the holo and the other ship’s alarms begin to blare; across the faltering connection, they sound as though Revan is hearing them from underwater.

 _“Primary shields offline.”_ Thell presses her eyes closed for a second, then stares out at Revan once again. Her face is set with resigned determination. _“The Mandalorians are coming back for another volley. We can’t hold them off this time.”_

Revan eyes her map of the battle and looks out the viewport once more. Fett’s ships are almost in range; her weapons officers have them targeted, but their laser cannons can’t reach yet. Thell’s ship is taking heavy fire, but it just has to hold together for a few more moments.

“Divert all your power to defenses and keep that ship intact,” Revan orders. Thell smiles, though the expression is dull.

_“It’s been an honor to serve under you, Revan. We’re taking as many of them down as we can.”_

“No, no, no! Thell, they’re almost in position. A few more seconds and we can get them—”

_“Critical losses to weapons and engine systems. This is goodbye, commander. May the Force be with you.”_

Thell salutes Revan with military precision and gives her one last nod from one commander to another, a farewell of equals, as the Mandalorian ships make another run.

Their guns fire, and Thell’s ship explodes in a hail of light and soundless expansion. The holoterminal flares bright and dies, and in the echoing silence, Revan feels every life on that ship flicker out.

Capital ships can have crews of thousands. Thell’s was fully-staffed, conscripted on a standard run to help Revan. Of all the times she has served with Thell over the course of the war, this was supposed to be the quickest, the easiest. It wasn’t supposed to end like this.

“Sir, the Mandalorian ships are in range.”

Karyn Thell is dead, and her death cannot be for nothing.

“Fire.”

Five Mandalorian ships go down in the first volley, and another four in the second. Revan cannot bring herself to smile as their debris fills the space where Thell’s ship floated only a minute ago.

“All targets eliminated,” a weapons officer speaks. The bridge lapses into silence save for faint chatter from Mireya’s comm.

The battle is all but over. After that much loss, Fett doesn’t have the numbers to hold out. One by one, the Mandalorian ships vanish into hyperspace, leaving only their most injured vessels behind. They will all be empty when Revan sends teams out to search them.

Alek turns away from the viewport and meets Revan’s eyes.

“I hope the cost was worth your victory, Supreme Commander,” he says; his voice is utterly devoid of emotion. Without another word, he pushes past her and stalks off the bridge.

For the next three hours, Revan handles the battle’s aftermath, ordering ships out to search for survivors and sending strike teams to the crippled Mandalorian ships. She oversees medbay transfers, gathers statistics, gives the Supreme Chancellor his report—alone, because Alek hasn’t reappeared since he left the bridge after the battle.

When the last shuttle comes back into the _Basilisk’s_ hangar, Revan barely stays to check the injured before she gives up on pretending to pay attention to everything that’s going on. Mireya is eighteen and more than ready to practice command for a few hours. Revan has something she has to solve.

Finding Alek isn’t hard. Even from across the ship, Revan can feel the bright point of his signature deep within his quarters. She just has to explain—it wasn’t supposed to be like this, Thell wasn’t supposed to die, this wasn’t Razari. He has to understand. She isn’t a _Mandalorian_. She doesn’t send people to their deaths in those numbers. Things go wrong in battle.

He has to understand. After everything they’ve been through, all the years Alek has spent at her side, he knows her mind better than anyone. This will pass.

But his door is firmly sealed when Revan comes to a halt outside it, and when she knocks, no answer comes from within.

 _Alek?_ She sends out the question as softly as she can. At least the bond is still open. Though they both know how to shield it, they never have for anything serious, and never very enthusiastically. The brush of Alek’s mind against hers is as familiar as the hum of her kyber crystals.

At last, the door slides open with a hiss. He doesn’t answer her mentally, just stands in the doorway and stares, but the sheer relief of seeing him is enough.

“Yes, _commander?”_ he snaps, crossing his arms, and all that relief falls away. Alek—he can’t—

“Alek, please.” She’s pleading now, but Force, the way he’s looking at her, like she’s a stranger—she can’t take it.

He shakes his head and sighs, looking off somewhere behind her.

“You don’t get it. After all this time, you still don’t get it. You just let a capital ship _die,_ Revan. I don’t really feel like talking to you. You have an entire ship to entertain yourself; you’ve made it clear enough that you don’t need my input.”

“What are you talking about? Of course I need your input. Force, you know Thell’s ship wasn’t supposed to be destroyed. It wasn’t supposed to happen like that.” Through the bond, she pushes as much as she can at him—the panic, the fear, how much it had gone against her original plan. He has to understand this; she didn’t do it intentionally.

“I watched you raze a city, Revan.” His voice is softer than she’s heard it in weeks, but his eyes are cold.

Revan reaches up with trembling fingers and unlatches her mask, pulls down her hood. Bare-faced, she looks at him through the doorway. Every moment of the battle is etched onto her face; she knows he can read it all, just as he can feel everything she’s feeling.

“Please. Just talk to me,” she begs, taking a step forward. Her mind is reaching out to his, despite the faint spikes she can feel along his mental walls. She knows he doesn’t like the risks she takes, but he has to understand how they pay off. She is winning the war. She has saved millions. Surely Alek can recognize that.

But when she reaches for his hand, he pulls away and steps back.

“Gods, Revan, how can you possibly look at what you’ve done and compartmentalize it like you do? How many thousands just died? And you’re here begging me to talk to you as though that’s the issue at stake. I felt them, Revan. I felt every one of Thell’s people die. For once in your life, deal with your own actions and stop coming to me like I’m going to fix everything. I’m sick of cleaning up your messes.”

And the durasteel doors of his mind slam shut. Revan can’t feel him, just the faint presence of a life form like any of the thousands of others, and it roots her in place long enough that when he turns away, when the doors to his quarters slide shut with a hiss, she doesn’t react.

She can’t feel Alek. She hasn’t been alone in her own mind since she was fourteen and she _can’t feel him_ and she’s staring at a blank grey wall with her mask in her hands and Alek isn’t there.

Even when they used to fight over everything meaningless as teenagers and didn’t speak for hours, Alek was always at the back of her mind, a little point of warmth that she never quite blocked out. They’ve had their disagreements over the course of the war—some risk he deems too great, a mission she thinks won’t pay off—but never like this. He’s always there for Revan to turn to after a great loss, when she’s spiraling and needs someone to keep her sane.

But the door doesn’t slide open again, and Alek’s presence does not reappear in her mind. The end of the bond is simply a cold, dull echo.

She remains outside the door longer than she should, but nothing changes for long enough that she eventually leaves the corridor behind. The bridge is busy enough when she returns that few people even spare her a glance, and she is glad for that.

“Where have you been?” Mireya asks as Revan slumps into an empty chair. Her mask is firmly in place; the girl can’t see how shaken she really is.

“Nowhere. It’s unimportant,” she mutters. “Just tell me what’s going on.”

“Lists of things you need to requisition. List of death tolls. List of damages. List of dead Jedi. List of—oh, Force, are you even listening to me?” Mireya demands.

“Can this wait for tomorrow?” Revan knows the answer, but after everything, she can’t look at Mireya’s stack of datapads right now. What are numbers compared to the hole in her head? She’s too exhausted to concentrate on anything, let alone whatever reports she has to send to the chancellor.

Mireya slams a hand into the console Revan is leaning against and bares her teeth.

“No,” she says, “it cannot. I am doing the job of three people because _your_ karking second-in-command up and disappeared after the battle and you abandoned your duties after the time-sensitive issues were taken care of to go hunting after him, and don’t you dare tell me that’s not where you were. I have been handling repairs, checking casualties, making lists of the damages _you_ incurred. I have been ordering this crew around and praying they listen to an eighteen-year-old who comes up to their shoulders instead of their Supreme Commander. I have been holding this crew together after you decided to have some argument on the bridge in the middle of a battle—do you know what that did to them? Do you know how much that shook their confidence, or do you care about anything except Alek right now?”

Mireya is _furious_ , but she isn’t wrong, and Revan knows it. She is barely holding herself together, and she left a padawan in charge of her entire fleet so she could—what? So she could go hunt down her best friend?

_Deal with your own actions._

“I’ll take care of it,” Revan says, taking the datapads Mireya has tossed in front of her. “It’ll be done as soon as I can get through it.”

Mireya rolls her eyes and mutters something under her breath, storming off towards the comms and trailing irritation behind her like a cloak. Revan sighs and closes her eyes.

How did it all go so wrong? The list of casualties is thousands of names long; she knows that the crew of Thell’s capital ship makes up a chunk of it. If she hadn’t set that trap, they would all be alive, and Revan would still be tangled in a battle with Cassus Fett. Was the cost worth it?

Was the cost worth Alek’s ire?

She shakes her head and tosses that datapad aside. The list of requisitions needs to go out as soon as possible; this battle was costly, and they were already running low on basic necessities. She queues up the basic ones, opens a comm, and begins to write, propping her feet up on the console’s base. She isn’t going back to her quarters; she can’t be alone right now. She can do her work here just fine. She can hold herself together for long enough to write a Fore-damned supply list before the weight of the battle, of Alek’s response, really strikes her.

If she thinks too deeply, she’ll fall apart right there, so she doesn’t, just focuses on the list one point at a time. She runs numbers, drafts messages, sends everything she needs to the Supreme Chancellor. Cressa has congratulated her for this battle. They won the planet, and she isn’t dead. By now, that seems to be all he requires. This isn’t a pyrrhic victory, not yet. She is Revan, master strategist. That’s all she needs to be.

And what right does Alek have to say that it comes at too high a cost? He doesn’t make these choices. He doesn’t have to. Revan is the one who brought them both to war. Revan has always been the leader. Revan has turned the tide of this bloody war.

“Uh, Supreme Commander?”

“What?” she growls, turning to stare down the timid little Mirialan. Weapons tech, by the badge on their uniform.

“We’re having some issues with one of the systems over there,” they say, gesturing towards one of the consoles across the bridge. “I don’t really know what the deal is, but I think it should be fixed before the next battle.”

“Then fix it!” Revan snaps. “Send a karking report down to the repair crew and get my flagship working! I’m not the only Force-damned person on the _Basilisk_ who can make things happen!”

The tech looks terrified. Revan doesn’t care, just snatches up the pile of datapads and strides off the bridge despite Mireya’s frantic shouting at her back. She doesn’t care about the blasted consoles, about whatever shuttles they lost in the battle. She’s been holding this fleet together for a karking year; someone else can deal with it for a night.

She holds herself together long enough to shoulder through the doors to her quarters, then whirls around and slams her mask into the far wall with a furious scream. It does nothing but dent the durasteel, and for a moment she just stands there, chest heaving, arm outstretched, before she falls to her knees and presses the heels of her palms into her eyes.

What has she just lost?

Revan and Alek; it’s always been Revan and Alek. Almost two decades of her life that he’s been at her side, and now she’s ruined it, now she’s driven him away. He followed when she left the Jedi behind, and he’s followed her into battle, he’s led her troops, he’s led the Revanchists, he’s always been next to her.

She doesn’t think she can disconnect herself from him, but he’s made his thoughts on that clear.

Revan is on her own.

She doesn’t sleep, though she does eventually curl up on her side and close her eyes. Not that it helps; she sees Thell’s ship shattering as the Mandalorians fall into place, sees Alek and his accusations and the way he looked at her, like she was the thing they went to war to fight. She reaches out unconsciously more times than she can count, and on every single one of them, she hits rock-solid shields.

Eventually, she just curls tighter into herself and tries to fall asleep as the darkness of the night surrounds her. It doesn’t work, but by morning, when she wrenches her limbs apart and crawls out of bed again, she is numb enough to function. She’ll need to properly relieve Mireya of command and get this ship into hyperspace. The nearest fueling ring isn’t far, and most of the fleet is running low, especially after the battle.

She is Supreme Commander. Her people will not see her break.

The mantra gets her to the bridge and no further. Alek is standing silhouetted against the viewport, hands clasped behind his back and feet set in a familiar stance. She wants nothing more than to reach out to him, to ask him if he’s alright, but she still can’t feel more than a dull flicker from him and the bond is dead.

He turns as she enters; gods, she knew he was good at hiding his expressions, but his face is flat as he stares across at her. She can read little but the tension in his shoulders and a hint of pain in his face.

“You have the bridge, commander,” he says softly, then strides from the room. For half a second, as he passes her, she expects the familiar clasp of his hand on her shoulder or any point of contact at all, but there is nothing except a slight movement of air. The door shuts with a hiss, and for the second time in as many days, Alek is lost to her.

“Chart a course to Esfar,” she orders the navigation crew instead of dwelling on whatever just happened, and for the next few hours, she loses herself in the mundanities of command. She has to make up for the day before; she can’t afford to let her crew lose confidence in her after a loss like that. They’ve been with her for almost two years, and this is the first time they’ve ever witnessed her fighting with Alek. She can feel how uneasy it makes them.

She thinks she’s doing fine, but six hours into her shift, Mireya yanks her out into the hall, shoves her into the nearest empty room, and wedges herself in behind Revan, then turns to face her.

“You’re the Supreme Commander, Revan. Piece yourself together long enough to sort this thing out and start acting like a leader again. I’m sick of having to apologize to some poor tech fresh out of Wild Space because you almost bit their head off for no reason, and I don’t want to do it again. Your command shouldn’t be my responsibility.”

“This isn’t something I can fix,” Revan snaps. She forgets sometimes that Mireya is so young, still a padawan.

“Then at least stop sulking until the crew is on shore leave and you don’t have to pretend to be well-adjusted.”

“He blocked me from his mind, Mireya! Do you know what that feels like? I’ve gone nine years without being alone in my own head and now he’s _gone._ ” Even talking about it opens that raw wound up again.

Mireya blinks, then leans back and shakes her head.

“You two did have a Force bond, then,” she says. “I suspected, but…”

“Congratulations, then. You have your confirmation. Now can I go back to running this ship?” Revan knows she’s lashing out, but for a moment, the shock on Mireya’s face is worth it, until her face twists back into an irritated grimace.

“Not everything is about you. He’s just as tetchy, he just has a better sabacc face; you think this isn’t hurting him too? Sort yourselves out. You’re running a ship.”

Mireya turns and slides from the door once more, leaving Revan alone.

The final two hours of her shift are the longest of Revan’s life. Mireya watches her the whole time, but she manages to resist the urge to shout at some untested soldier or officer who’s barely seen battle. The sharp, angry thorn under her skin lessens marginally as time wears on, and maybe Revan can get used to this in time, can relearn how to exist alone.

She has almost convinced herself of this when she returns to her quarters—early in the afternoon, but she can’t face the mess hall or the sparring rings, not yet. Her longing is something living by now, but she can survive its claws and the way her ribs tighten when she thinks about Alek.

She has sprawled across a chair when a whisper of power coats the bond, power that isn’t hers, and Alek’s shields fall all at once. The sheer force of his presence slams into her; it’s been almost a day without him and she didn’t realize how much space he took up inside her head until he was gone but he’s _back_ , and she can feel him as strongly as always, all his anger and pain and grief and the quiet way she can sense he missed her.

A few seconds later, someone knocks on her door, and she knows it’s him before she even reaches out in the Force. She stands, slides open the door with a careful gesture. In that first tenuous second, it’s all she can do to keep from stumbling as he stands there on the other side of the doorway.

“Revan.” His voice is hoarse. He looks as though he hasn’t slept since Quelii, and with the way his emotions are tangling around the bond, she can believe that.

“You’re here,” she says, as if that’s any sort of answer, as if she doesn’t mean _I’m sorry, I’m sorry for everything, just come back._

“I know,” he answers, and she must have said that into the bond, but it doesn’t change the way he’s looking at her. “Take off the mask; I’m not doing this if I can’t even see your face.”

On any other day, Revan would refuse, but this is Alek, and this is today; she reaches up and unbuckles it, then slides it from her face. They stand in an echo of their positions yesterday, and for several seconds, they just look at each other.

Alek steps through the door and lets it slide shut behind him. All of a sudden, Revan’s quarters are too small for the two of them—it was never supposed to be like this, with this much space between them, but he makes no other moves, just looks at her.

“I—” he begins, then cuts off with a sigh. _You condemned an entire ship and it was nothing to you, Revan. I don’t recognize what you become when you’re in command._

He’s not just talking about Quelii now. Losses have become part of her strategy; the Mandalorians don’t expect Revan to sacrifice cities or worlds, so she does, and she wins. She is not thinking like a Jedi on the bridge of the _Basilisk_. She is thinking like a tactician. Any victory is worth something when the Mandalorians—who have one warrior to every five of the Republic’s and still make the galaxy shake—are losing ground.

And Alek is right. Revan doesn’t sleep after major battles, and sometimes her losses are too great, and as much as Tol Cressa might congratulate her, his officials do not.

 _I know you’re not unaffected,_ Alek continues. _Every time a battle goes wrong or too many people die, you don’t know how to cope, and you always come to me._

“You’re the only one who understands,” Revan says out loud. If she tries to say it mentally, everything she’s feeling will spill over into him, so she pours as much as she can into her words.

His face softens, loses that sharp edge it’s had since the day before. Neither of them have moved, but the space between them feels narrower now, less like an uncrossable gulf.

“I am not your absolution. I can’t piece you back together after every battle, Revan. It’s not fair to either of us. You don’t see how badly it’ll damage us.”

Revan wants to say that it isn’t true. She wants to be able to look him in the eyes and say she wouldn’t use him like that. But when she thinks back to everything that’s gone wrong in the war, every moment when her strategies cost lives, she always runs to Alek afterwards. He’s been her source of consolation since they were younglings, and the Force speaks the truth of his words.

“I’m sorry. For everything. I never—Alek, I never meant to hurt you.”

“No, you never mean it, but you don’t think. You just act. I’m supposed to be your second. Force, Revan, you’re supposed to _trust_ me, not just make some blind decision in the middle of a battle. You can’t exist as a monolith. And maybe those soldiers out there don’t know you—” he gestures out past her door, to the decks of a ship full of Jedi and officers and troops who have never seen her face— “but I do.”

She closes her eyes and doesn’t bother to mask her emotions, the swirl of guilt and pain that comes with his words.

“I do trust you. After everything, of course I trust you.”

“Then _show me._ Don’t make these plans without me and expect me to be fine with them when the first I’m learning of them is when they’re playing out on the battlefield. Just… promise me that much, Revan. Can you do that?”

“Yes. Force, of course I can.” Revan knows she must sound terrified, but she can’t do this again, can’t lose Alek over this war.

He lets out a sigh and nods once, then frowns and steps closer, pressing the back of his hand against her forehead. At Revan’s protesting noise, he shakes his head.

“You look terrible.”  
“Thank you,” she replies, exasperated, and bats away his hand.

“When’s the last time you ate or drank anything?” he asks. “I know you didn’t sleep last night, so I’m not going to bother asking about that.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be mad at me?” Revan can’t bring herself to protest too much; the slide back into familiarity has left her reeling, and she’s missed this so much.

Alek makes a noise in the back of his throat. “How are you standing right now?”

“The Force can sustain a Jedi for—”

“Don’t you _dare_ quote Vandar at me, Revan. I had to sit through those lessons too. Now eat.”

He tosses a ration bar squarely at her chest.

“Were you just carrying this around?”

“Some of us consume food on a regular basis,” he mutters. Revan doesn’t comment on the fact that it’s her favorite kind, just offers him a tentative smile. He returns it, and the relief that washes over her is enough that she sags against the wall.

Military rations are absolutely horrible. The few Revan can eat without gagging are, generously, the texture of sawdust and flavored like questionable offcasts from lower-level Coruscanti diners. This one is no different, and yet it’s some of the best food Revan’s ever tasted. As a bonus, she doesn’t feel quite like she’s about to keel over.

Maybe Alek does have a point about food. Force knows he bothers her about it often enough.

“Are we okay, then?” she asks faintly once the ration bar is gone. Alek doesn’t push any more food at her, just sends her fond exasperation 

_Yes, we’re okay._

_Mireya will be pleased. She’s been angry at me all day._

“What, you too?”

Revan snorts at Alek’s evident surprise. Apparently the little padawan has been after both of them. Revan’s going to have to thank her later. She isn’t sure if she could have survived another day with that empty echo in the back of her skull.

“Go get something to drink,” Alek says after they’ve lapsed into silence again. “I have to go; I’ve got paperwork to finish.”

“Don’t boss me around,” she shoots back, but the words aren’t backed by anger. He cares, and that is enough.

His answering smile is softer than she’s seen it in days. He leans down and drops his lips to her forehead; Revan leans into the gesture, and when he pulls back, she wraps an arm around him and presses her face into his shoulder. For a moment, he doesn’t move, then he finally reciprocates the gesture.

“I missed you,” he whispers into the top of her head, and she knows that’s not what he’s really saying.

“I know.”

This time, when he leaves, Revan knows he’ll come back.

Revan’s sleep is uneasy on the best of nights. This is not one of those nights. After the past two days, she isn’t expecting to fall asleep immediately, and as the night wears on, the walls of her quarters close in around her. Eventually, she kneels on her meditation mat and reaches into the Force in a final, desperate attempt to get some rest. When she finally sinks into sleep, her dreams catapult her into what would be a nightmare while waking.

The bridge of a Mandalorian ship opens up before her. She has only seen them dead and empty, drifting in the unknown of space; this one is crawling with armored figures, full to the brim of Mandalorians prepared for battle. Orders ring out in rough Mando’a, most of the words too fast for Revan to make out, let alone translate with the few phrases she’s picked up.

She turns to face the front of the ship and freezes. Among the beskar-coated warriors standing on the bridge is the suit of gold armor that has haunted her steps for almost two years, the greatest commander the Mandalorians possess. In front of him, a holoterminal flickers with static.

Fett. _Fett._ She surges forward with a snarl; he’s right there, right in front of her, and she _wants to see him fall—_

 _LOOK,_ commands the voice, and she struggles against the bonds holding her in place until she realizes that Fett is moving, Fett is _moving._ A hand clutches at his throat; his knees begin to buckle, and though his chest is heaving, no air is circling around him. He is choking on nothing at all.

 _THIS IS YOUR LEGACY,_ and Revan _looks_ , and the figure on the holoterminal is glowing, wrath incarnate—

And the Force is wrapped around Fett’s throat until the holoterminal cuts out and the figure, _Revan’s_ figure, vanishes and Fett collapses to his knees and coughs hoarsely as air fills his lungs once more.

Oh, gods. Revan did this. Revan did it without knowing—she could have killed him from a fleet away and never would have known. She could have killed a man with only the Force.

 _Why are you showing me this?_ she asks the nameless voice.

_THE FORCE IS SHOWING YOU YOUR PAST. ONLY THE FORCE._

The Force is bleeding darkness around her, but this voice—some manifestation of her subconscious, all her deepest fears, her little darknesses—speaks the truth. She knows it with icy certainty, here in this place within her dreams.

Revan’s face is uncovered when she falls to her knees in this soft night, when the Force drops over her shoulders like a shroud and her chest cracks open.

_Revan Adarii will be the downfall of us all._

To Vrook, Revan was always crooked, but maybe he spoke the truth if she can do this, if she can kill like this, like she did on Eres (the Force is an _ally,_ not a _tool,_ her masters always said, but what is it when she tears enemies apart with it, when she reaches down inside herself and drags out nothing but a tempest of unchecked power, and maybe Vrook was _right)._

_Revan, wake up._

That voice doesn’t belong here; it’s not hers, it’s not the one she hears so often— _outsider,_ the Force howls, and Revan almost listens—

_Come on, Rev._

She falls, and the Force opens up before her, and her eyes fly open as she returns to her quarters and the meditation mat that barely protects her knees. Her lightsaber hilts are in her hands, held up at Alek’s throat as he kneels in front of her.

“I’m not going to take that personally,” he says softly, mouth turned up in half a grin. Ever so gently, he wraps his hands around hers and pulls the saber hilts from them, and she lets the tension drain from her muscles with a sigh.

She doesn’t bother apologizing anymore. It’s not the first or hundredth time she’s held her lightsabers to Alek, and he’s done the same to her. Thus are the dangers of too much war and of the visions that haunt Revan’s waking steps.

Whatever she just saw, she wants to forget it. Fett’s armor, the panicked motions of his hands reaching for his throat—

Alek’s brow furrows with concern.

“You alright?” he asks. “What’s going on?”

 _I almost killed a man,_ she doesn’t tell him. _And I think it was for you._

“Another vision,” she says instead. “Nothing unusual; I’m just sick of them.”

Force, Alek keeps _looking_ at her like he can see right through her. That gaze pins her in place as he sets her lightsabers carefully, deliberately on the side of the mat. He brushes a knuckle along her cheek almost absently as the bond flickers with fondness, then hauls himself up and sits on the edge of her bed.

Revan sighs and twists herself around so she can lean back against the side of the bed, wedging herself between Alek’s knees. They will be out of hyperspace for a few more hours as the _Basilisk_ refuels, so she has a little more time left to look at open space. Here and now, she could tell Alek what she just saw. She could tell him about Cassus Fett or about how for months she’s dreamed of a galaxy dying. It would be so, so easy just to say something.

For a moment, she almost does. She almost opens her mouth and spills all her secrets out, but she knows if she starts now, she’ll never stop. Alek must sense her hesitance; he runs a hand through her unbound hair and presses reassurance across at her. Her innermost shields waver.

But in the end, she can’t. Alek might be one of the few Jedi alive who know what it is to have visions, but his are sparse and scattered, and he hasn’t seen what she has. He doesn’t _understand,_ not in the way she needs. Knowing that darkness, tasting that death, she doesn’t want him to understand anyway. Better that only one of them has to carry the weight, and better that it’s Revan.

Besides, he told her that he can’t be her confessor—that he can’t bear the weight of her sins. She won’t force them on him now, when she’s still holding onto their bond as though he’ll disappear from the other end again.

“I’m going back to Dantooine,” Alek says into the silence, and for a moment, frozen dread roots Revan in place. He can’t mean now, not when they aren’t fighting anymore, not when—

 _After the war._ His voice is far too amused, and she turns around as far as she can to glare at him.

“Force, you can’t scare me like that!” she exclaims, elbowing one leg. He kicks her side in return.

“You’re in my head, Revan. I didn’t think I _could.”_

 _I hate you sometimes._ Her words mask how much that connection means to her now.

_Love you too._

One of the stars that lie beyond this transparisteel barrier is Dina, deep across the galaxy. Revan doesn’t know which one it is, only that somewhere in the scattered white is the star that sustains Dantooine.

“I’m going back, too,” she finally says. “Once all this is over, I’ll find some cave or abandoned building or something. Fix it up, get a droid or two. Watch the sun set every night, when I don’t have anything more important than dinner to think about.”

Alek laughs.

“And what about me, hm? Are you going to abandon me to the wiles of the Council? Oh, yes, masters, I _did_ return with Revan, but she stole my speeder and vanished—”

“Oh, _shut up_ , of course you’re coming with me.” Now she’s laughing too.

“Fine, but I get to program the droids. And I’m cooking.”

“First of all, C7 was a perfectly fine droid, thank you very much, and second of all, my cooking is not that bad!”

Alek leans forward far enough to set his chin on top of her head, and the sheer affection of the gesture is almost enough to distract from his next few words.

“It was a kowakian monkey-lizard, Revan. We weren’t that desperate. And C7 tried to shoot me.”

“That was a—”

“Programming error? Because he seemed fairly keen on murder for a droid who was supposed to be a translator.”

“He had a faulty brain circuit.”

“He had a faulty _something,_ that’s for sure.”

“Alright, you see how easy it is to build a droid.”

“I will! And just for that, it’s going to be the best damn droid you’ve ever seen.”

“It’ll be a glorified lightsaber rack, and I’m going to stick it right by the door.”

Alek chuckles. “At least my glorified lightsaber rack won’t try to kill you.”

 _The steppes are far enough away from the Enclave that they won’t come and bother us,_ Revan muses.

_I’m sure there’s enough unoccupied land out there that you can trick some poor government worker into giving it to you._

_We’re Jedi! We’ll return as heroes of the Republic. They can spare a few acres._

_Never change, Revan._

_Oh, like you’ve never mind-tricked your way into some discounted supplies. Does Nar Shaddaa ring a bell?_

Alek groans and shakes his head. “How did I know you were going to bring that up?”

“So it’s settled. I’ll get the land.” Revan grins, though Alek can’t see it from behind, and settles herself into a more comfortable position.

Her smile softens as she looks out into the blackness.

“Out there,” she murmurs, pointing to a tiny point of whiteness in the midnight-blue of space. “That’s where it’ll be. Nothing but the grasslands and the hills.”

He nudges her hand a hair to the left and gestures out beyond the window.

“Here’s a better spot,” he says so softly she barely hears it. He catches her hand, tangles their fingers together. “A cliff, maybe a waterfall nearby. We’ll be able to see for miles. Just us and the kath hounds for company.”

“You think Vrook will warn the padawans about us?” she asks, squeezing Alek’s hand.

“About you, maybe. Not me; I was a good padawan who never got in trouble.”

Revan can recall at least six separate occasions when Vrook dragged Alek into the council chambers to lecture him, and she sends one especially vivid image across the bond—Vrook, absolutely red with anger and shouting about Revan’s ‘bad influence’ and how Alek is supposed to be the responsible one, having failed to notice Alek stifling a smile as he hovers a bucket of water over the master’s head.

“Never,” Revan agrees. Force, they were both so young back then, back when their biggest problems were avoiding yet another lecture and trying not to get stuck on Dantooine for more rotations.

“You and I were going to change the galaxy, Revan. We were so sure of it back then.”

 _And here we are, at the head of an army, reshaping the galaxy’s face,_ she replies. “Enough change for you?”

“I’m not the one who’s never satisfied.”

“Once the Mandalorians are defeated, I will be. The galaxy will be safe; I’ll have everything I need. The lives of planets aren’t going to be in my hands anymore. No more orders from the Supreme Chancellor; no more disapproving councils.”

“If you get bored, I can always fake distress, have you come rescue me,” Alek jokes, voice light and teasing. “I’m sure I can be very convincing.”

“I appreciate the offer,” she says quietly. “I might take you up on it.”

If she could spend every night for the rest of her life like this, she would. It strikes her then, staring out the window with her hand in Alek’s—she loves him. And it isn’t forbidden for a Jedi to love, exactly, only that duty to the Force and to all people must come before anything, even the ones they love.

Revan has never been able to make that choice where Alek is concerned. No matter what she’d do to protect the galaxy, he’s everything, and always has been, and she loves him for it. She knows now more than ever how much she’ll give to keep him at her side.

Alek is the best of them. He always has been, ever since they were children and he was keeping all of Revan’s worst impulses in check. Far better than she ever will be. Revan is old enough and experienced enough to know the bitter scent of darkness she can never shake.

But for now, none of that matters. Out in the distant haze of the future stands a house half-hidden by tall grass, a sun and twin moons hanging overhead. This war won’t matter then. The horrors sleeping in Revan’s chest and in her dreams will have no purchase there. Revan will vanish into Dantooine’s plains with Alek, and she won’t have to be a legend anymore. She can put down the mask and make sure the galaxy forgets her face.

She will fight this war, and when it’s done, she will have earned that future, if nothing else. She will have earned her peace and her place at Alek’s side.

The terrors will end when the Mandalorians surrender. Revan only needs to survive until then.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This might have taken twice as long to write as every other chapter here, but in my defense, it's almost 11 thousand words, and it grew legs and developed a plot on its own. It was fun to write, though; I enjoyed delving deeper into conflict and how Revan has changed over the course of the war.  
> It's also very heartbreaking to look at Revan's concept of home and what she wants to return to after the war. She has this longing to go back to Dantooine and to the home she remembers from childhood, but she's never going to get that peace. She is so determined to end the war that she doesn't recognize what it's doing to her, to Alek, and to all the other Jedi who follow her.  
> Next chapter is likely going to be a fairly standard one, but after that is Dxun, and boy do I have something planned for that.  
> I hope this is at least partially coherent. Enjoy the angst!


	7. Lypophrenia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _She should be happy. Two years of combat have drained her, and she will be only too glad to finally defeat Mandalore and send his people running. She should be_ ecstatic. _But her visions are coming faster now, no longer separated by months or years but by weeks if she is lucky, and a shadow hangs over the galaxy. She hasn’t rested easy since she was eighteen and shivering in the rain on Dantooine and the Force was whispering_ danger _in her ear._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lypophrenia (n): a vague feeling of sorrow or sadness seemingly without any apparent cause or source.

Halfway across the Mid Rim, Mandalore the Ultimate has met the  _ Basilisk _ in battle. Revan’s flagship and most of her fleet have been drawn into a battle the likes of which they haven’t seen since early in the war. This is not a battle that could end the war, not yet—Revan has no illusions about how quickly the Mandalore will vanish once defeat has come to him—but it will be one for the annals of history.

Revan is not with the  _ Basilisk _ or anywhere in her fleet. Revan is shivering in a crashed shuttle half-buried in freezing swamp muck in a different sector frantically trying to cobble together enough working electronics to get the ship’s comm up and running. Her wrist comm won’t reach even close to the distance needed to hail a friendly ship, but she can’t afford to dismantle it until she has no other options.

Looking around at the bits of electronics strewn around her in a circle, she thinks she may be reaching that point.

Ten hours earlier, everything had been fine. She had been returning from a high-security mission accompanied by a pilot and two soldiers all bearing Mandalorian intel. Her ship had locked onto the coordinates of the  _ Basilisk; _ within a few hours, they would have arrived and plugged the intel into the ship computers, then sent it off to the Supreme Chancellor himself. Quick, easy, painless, and completely, utterly devoid of anything to do with swamps, let alone cold ones.

The pilot had dropped out of hyperspace to change lanes. For a moment, the stars had flared into the streaks that preceded hyperspace’s whorls of blue and white, and then the ship had shuddered and begun to plummet into the atmosphere of the dwarf planet marking the lane change. The change in gravity had knocked Revan unconscious for several hours; when she had awoken, wincing at the probable concussion she had sustained, the other three members of her team had been dead, and so was every system in the blasted ship besides life support.

Revan is running out of options now. She has managed to cobble together a functioning scanner, but nothing is in this area, and these hyperspace routes are barely monitored. That was why they had chosen them for this mission; Revan is carrying fleet movements and battle strategies for half of Mandalore’s commanders, enough to decimate him for months—or until he notices exactly what intel has been stolen. This mission is time-sensitive.

The scanner screeches, startling Revan out of her cloud of misery. She’s picking up chatter, which should be impossible. No sentients live out here, or at least none with this technology. And yet the activity is right there.

She reaches out and fiddles with the scanner until actual, intelligible words begin to emerge from its speakers. For a moment, hope fills her; they’re likely either Republic or unaligned, and any mercs or pirates she can pay heavily (not heavily enough to arouse suspicions about who she is, but enough to get her to safety in secrecy). Then the words become clearer, and all that joy dissipates.

Mando’a. She’s hearing a steady stream of Mando’a read out in a bored voice, and according to the scanner, it’s coming from only a few miles away. Kriff. Judging by the nature of the transmission, it’s not a solitary Mandalorian or another downed shuttle, either. Revan has landed right on top of a hidden Mandalorian camp.

_ Kriff. _ If they saw her shuttle go down, they’ll have search parties running a grid across this swamp until they find her. Maybe they won’t pick her out as Revan at first—half the Jedi in the galaxy have blue lightsabers like the one she’s wielding now, and her mask is hidden in a locked chest deep within the shuttle, discarded in favor of a rebreather that protects her against airborne toxins and pollutants, useful when running around a Hutt planet. It only shows her eyes and the skin around them, but she still feels unreasonably exposed.

Well, the only three people who have seen her in it are dead now, so it no longer matters.

“We’re really in it now,” Revan mutters, tossing the lightsaber between her hands. Its kyber crystal feels almost as familiar as her own two after all these years, but even Alek’s weapon is no substitute for the ones she left back on the  _ Basilisk. _ She will be glad to be able to return it to him once this is all over. Assuming, of course, that she makes it off this rock alive.

Another burst of chatter comes across the scanner. This time, Revan manages to pick up a few more words— _ camp, warriors, basilisk, _ and something she thinks is a type of stew of all things—before the channel goes silent. Given the little she can understand, she can hear no word of any sort of search, so she has to assume that they don’t know that a Republic shuttle went down. It doesn’t speak much to their defenses, though the meteorites that plummet onto this planet’s surface with regularity might have obscured her fall, but it does help her, and it tells her something else.

The Mandalorian camp isn’t on guard. An installation this far out of the way, with minimal defenses, might have just what she needs to leave before someone notices that she still isn’t on the  _ Basilisk _ or anywhere near the system. She wishes she could just contact Alek through the bond, but he’s too far away; she can only get vague sensations of feelings and the knowledge that he’s alive, which is why she hates being separated by so much distance. It makes an itch rise under her skin.

Revan has never been any sort of tech expert, but she does know how to get a basic comm system running again. With a little bit of elbow grease and some dubious connections, she’ll be able to get the comms up with only a few pieces of tech. If she can locate that Mandalorian base and get inside it, she can get that equipment and send a message to the Republic. Maybe she’ll even make it back to her flagship before the battle is entirely over.

She stretches out with the Force to feel outside the shuttle. When no other life forms make themselves apparent, she flicks her fingers and lets the shuttle door slide open with a hiss, then steps outside as quietly as possible. Her boots sink into foul-smelling muck, and she groans internally. Her clothes aren’t going to be fit for anything besides incineration when she gets back.

Judging by the transmission, the Mandalorian base is only a few miles away. Luckily, the crashed shuttle has a speeder that is still mostly functional, and Revan plugs the sensor’s vague directions into the speeder and hops on. It’s a risk to make this much noise, but if she remains undetected, she’ll have a faster escape on the way out. Indeed, within a few minutes, her sensors begin to pick up more and more, until the readings of a base make themselves clear. Revan abandons her speeder a mile from its apparent edge and hikes the rest of the way through the swamp, committing her path to memory as best she can.

These secret Mandalorian bases are always on swamp worlds. Revan hates it, though she has to admire their dedication. Somehow, this one has managed to be constructed on what has to be the only flat area of land around for miles upon miles. The perimeter is lit up, though in the dead of night, huge patches are dark enough that Revan’s black robes might go unnoticed for long enough to get her inside, though they won’t be much use surrounded by beskar. She squints and lets the Force swirl, feeling for any hints of what to do.

_ There. _ Her eyes fly open as she senses a solitary Mandalorian just outside the base’s perimeter. When she follows the Force signature, she finds a tall, rangy woman propped up against the wall and swearing under her breath as she gives her blaster a once-over. As lost in her task as she is, she doesn’t notice Revan until her borrowed lightsaber is at her throat, and she’s unconscious before she has the chance to shout. Revan makes quick work of stripping her armor off and dressing in it; though it only has a beskar chestpiece and helmet, even the leather and plastoid weighs her down uncomfortably, and she grimaces as she stuffs her equipment into various pouches and pockets. She drags the Mandalorian beneath a bush, covers her with as much detritus as she can find, and turns to stare grimly up at the base. As a precaution, she keeps the rebreather, though she leaves her robes piled near the unconscious Mandalorian. She isn’t looking forward to this, and better that she takes the precaution.

As it happens, getting into the base is not her issue. She hops over the wall and doesn’t attract a single stare; apparently, that’s how they all go in and out, as most are equipped with jetpacks. Revan hopes they don’t notice that hers isn’t trailing smoke when she lands in a crouch. Surprisingly, she doesn’t count too many warriors milling around the courtyard, though when she casts her senses out, she can feel clusters beneath the earth. Good; getting her equipment shouldn’t be too great a difficulty now.

She peers inside a few of the tents set up in the wide expanse of the base, but nothing besides a few empty bunks and some racks of weapons fill those, and she doesn’t dare try the row of ships sitting along one wall yet. The minute she makes a move towards those, the ruse will be up, and she can’t afford that yet. Instead, she turns to the squat building protruding from one exterior wall. Its door hangs open, and inside, a solitary Mandalorian is spinning around in a chair, his armor scattered throughout the room. Evidently this isn’t a very active base—strange, for such a secret one, but Revan isn’t complaining about their security measures.

With one final glance around, she approaches him. If she can get him out without knocking him unconscious, that will be best, but the room is small enough that she could take him in a melee fight, especially given that his armor isn’t even on his body.

“Hey, the commander wants to talk to you,” she calls from just outside the doorway. “He didn’t sound too happy.”

The Mandalorian’s eyes widen and he swears, hands going to the pieces of armor scattered across the room’s equipment display.

“Ordo? Now?” he asks, sounding a bit desperate. Revan crosses her arms and leans against the doorway, committing that name to memory.

“Yeah. I’d hurry it up.”

With one final exhale, he brushes past Revan and leaves the room, looking very pale as he makes his way to a lift that must lead deeper into the base. Hopefully, that will keep him occupied for a few minutes, long enough for Revan to gut this equipment and get the hells out of here. Besides, if he’s taking off his armor on-duty, he deserves a lecture. Revan’s people are never that careless.

The displays don’t seem to be security, which will likely buy Revan a few more minutes. The one on the far left, though she can’t read its characters, looks like a comms setup. She yanks a knife from her belt—and thank the Force these Mandalorians always have more weapons than they should, because it always comes in handy—and peels back its front to expose the wiring and guts of the machine. From there, finding the components to fix her ship’s comms is a relatively simple matter. She pulls them out as carefully as she can and stuffs them into her belt pouches, then reseals the display’s surface and prays that the Mandalorians don’t notice. For a minute, she lets herself lean against the display and breathe. She aches from the crash, her head is pounding, and she’s exhausted. All she wants to do is rest.

She could go back to the ship now, try to cobble together something strong enough to reach into space. That would be the smart thing to do; the datasticks sealed in a tiny blasterproof box next to her mask back at the speeder agree with that sentiment. Unfortunately for them and for Revan’s common sense, she has at least a few minutes before everyone in this base starts shooting at her, and she intends to wring as much out of their computers as she can.

The lift that runs down to the center of the base is a strange, open platform that sinks straight through the ground. Like the rest of the base, it feels rough, though the dirt encrusting it says it has been in place for quite some time. When Revan steps onto it, it groans suspiciously, and she is glad when it reaches its lowest point and she can step onto solid ground again. Again, not one of the few Mandalorians scattered throughout the wide hallway glances twice at her, and she sets her shoulders back with as much confidence as she can and tries to look like she knows where she’s going. A few of the rooms she passes are barracks, judging by the signatures inside and the glimpses she sees through cracks in doors, but at last, she comes across an empty room that looks rather promising. Viewscreens line one entire wall, and on another, sensors blink with blue and red lights. Those displays make Revan frown; she recognizes enough of the symbols that she pauses, looks around her, and ducks inside the room. When she comes to stand in front of them and scans them through the helmet’s HUD, it becomes clear what she’s looking at.

Basilisk war droids. This base is full of Mandalorians trained to use them, and judging by the panels here, at least thirty droids are being stored deep within its belly, likely more. She needs to get this intel back to the Republic.

She has barely managed to find a free datastick and download the intel when two pairs of heavy boots come to pause outside the door. Revan’s hand twitches towards the lightsaber hidden in the holster strapped to her thigh, and she stuffs the datastick into her belt to join the comm pieces.

The door slides open. The Mandalorians that step through are both wearing helmets and clutching blasters in their hands. Revan offers the closest approximation to a greeting she has, and for a moment, she thinks it has worked, that they’re just doing a routine check.

Then they level their blasters and fire, and it’s all Revan can do to duck behind a desk and avoid getting her legs shot off. Mandalorians don’t beat around the bush, and apparently they know she’s not one of them now.

The pair fans out; Revan keeps an eye on them as best she can, and when one comes to a halt beneath a heavy rack stuffed with equipment crates, she brings one down on his head with all the strength she can muster in the Force. He drops like a rock, and in the split second of hesitation following that, she lashes out and slams the other’s helmet into the wall. Once she senses that both are unconscious, she slips out from behind the desk, steps over their prone forms, and darts out into the hallway. Though Alek’s lightsaber is clutched tightly in her hand, she doesn’t ignite it yet; the surprise will be worth having to dodge more blaster bolts.

She has been in the hallway for only a few seconds when the first shots ring out, closely followed by a volley from the other direction. She flattens herself against the wall and grits her teeth. She’s pinned down, and the lift has stopped moving, though that won’t do much to delay her. The lax security from before has been more than made up for.

A blur launches itself out of the shadows, and Revan barely swings sideways in time to avoid being tackled. Her smaller size works with her in this case—she twists around, deflects another round of blasterfire with the Mandalorian’s beskar armor, then jabs the lightsaber into his throat and ignites it at the base of his chin in a quick one-two motion. Hand-to-hand is over now. It’s time for her to show them what a real Jedi can do.

She manages to make it halfway down the hall, lightsaber moving in a blur of blue and shots pinging off the walls around her, before one sneaks past her guard and catches her in the thigh. It stings like a son of a Hutt, and she staggers for just long enough that a Mandalorian manages to get close enough to send a knife flinging in her direction. Though she bats it away with a wave of her hand, it lands too close for comfort.

“You can’t possibly think that you’ll fight your way out of this one,” the closest Mandalorian sneers. 

“None of you have ever fought a Jedi, have you?” Revan spits back, and shoves the entire cluster down the hall with a wave of the Force. In the resulting confusion, she manages to kill two more and render another one unconscious, and that’s enough to get her to the base of the lift before more blaster fire pins her down. One leap will get her to the top, but if they don’t stop shooting at her, she’ll be too dead to appreciate reaching the surface again. 

This might have been a worse idea than Revan anticipated.

Luckily, the hallway, though wide, is too narrow for the Mandalorians to fight side-by-side with any effectiveness. They are all used to fighting on battlefields as one; Revan is Jedi-trained, and she has been fighting on her own since she was a child. That proves to be an advantage here.

She drops into a crouch as three Mandalorians approach her. One has made the mistake of not putting on her helmet, and when she lunges, Revan slams her foot into her opponent’s face. As she staggers back, another quick punch lands her on the ground unconscious, and Revan turns her attention to the remaining two. As she attacked the helmetless warrior, she has been deftly avoiding their blows, and she turns and kicks one squarely in the chest. As he staggers back, she ignites the lightsaber once more and sinks it into her second opponent’s chestplate. The armor, a beskar alloy rather than the pure metal, does nothing to block the saber’s blade, and within a few seconds, Revan manages to strike the third one below the shoulder in another vulnerable spot. Now that those three are dead or unconscious, the next closest Mandalorians are several meters back, and though they are shooting at her with considerable force, none are close enough to stop her as she bats away the blaster bolts and leaps upward. The few Mandalorians armed with jetpacks like the one she quickly discards when she hits the surface were some of the first to come after her, and she has at least a few seconds before any others can manage to ascend the drop. This doesn’t stop them shooting after her, but between the beskar and the lightsaber, the shots don’t land.

Until one does. As Revan deflects a well-aimed bolt from her legs, another comes flying out and smashes against the helmet’s visor. Pain explodes through her skull at the contact. She staggers back with the weight of the shot, and though the beskar of the helmet dissipates the energy, the visor is cracked too badly for her to see out of.

At least she brought a backup mask. She discards the helmet by the lift and fastens the rebreather over her face, hoping it offers at least some privacy. The last thing she wants to do is show her face in the middle of an enemy camp.

Revan has only a few options. She could take her chances in the swamp and go back to the crashed shuttle, praying that the Manadlorians can’t follow her trail through the muck and aren’t looking for the site of a very noticeable shuttle crash, or—her eyes catch on the opposing wall and the row of shuttles lined up there. If she’s lucky, she might be able to get one up and running before they can shoot her down.

Judging by the noises down below, she doesn’t have much time. Her leg has started to throb, and the amount of blood coating her stolen armor does little to comfort her. Her head has begun to spin, and now that her adrenaline is fading, the blurriness she chalked up to the Mandalorian helmet is beginning to grow worse. A strange ringing in her ears has started, too, and she winces as it breaks her concentration.

The shouting grows louder. Revan grits her teeth and stretches out her hand, feeling for her speeder and the bag tied to it, and prays it can reach her in time. She isn’t leaving without those datasticks and her mask, her  _ proper _ mask. She misses it already.

The seconds wear on. She is running out of time, and her injuries are beginning to catch up to her. She is almost ready to brave the swamp outside the base when at last a familiar bag comes soaring over the exterior wall and lands in her outstretched hands. She checks its contents, finds the mask and box secure, and slings the bag over her shoulder, then stops dead as a single Mandalorian finally emerges from underground and levels a blaster rifle straight at her chest.

Thirty feet to the nearest shuttle, twenty between her and the Mandalorian. She deflects his first shot and takes off running, only for the ground in front of her to explode in a shower of dirt and stone. He clearly knows what he’s doing, unlike the previous warriors, which speaks to experience. Revan ducks behind a stack of crates and avoids another shot, studying his movements.

He is wearing a full suit of beskar, sans helmet. Judging by its shine, this is pure, not the alloy Revan has come across so many times, and the symbol of Clan Ordo etched into one pauldron tells Revan that this is the commander of the base. He clearly knows his way around a blaster, and if he is running a whole operation like this, Revan is willing to bet her life that he’s just as good in hand-to-hand. He isn’t the sort of person she wants to fight with a hole in her leg and a concussion that’s only getting worse.

A shot blows apart the crates she is hiding behind and she scrambles towards the shuttle, dodging blaster fire until she manages to haul herself onto one wing.

“I’m a little impressed,” the commander says, aiming his rifle straight at her. She manages to deflect it, though her movements are growing less coordinated by the second. “I wouldn’t have expected a Jedi to walk straight into a Mandalorian camp alone. Unless, of course, you’re not alone.”

If he thinks reinforcements are coming, Revan is more likely to survive. She stays silent and focuses on the latch of the ship’s cockpit, which is proving difficult. Another volley of blaster fire comes flying towards her, and though she flattens herself against the ship and avoids being hit, its engines take the brunt of the damage. Kriff, she really needs to get out of here, but she can barely make the jump over the wall now, let alone a mile-long hike back into the swamp and the remaining few miles to her ship. The Mandalorians will find her long before she can even get her comms running, and then she’ll really be in bad shape.

Another few shots, each caught by her lightsaber, and she manages to reach a farther shuttle. The commander is waiting for her to make the next move; he can’t see her now, can’t figure out which shuttle she’s behind, and she doubts he knows how injured she is, so he will be cautious in his attack. She can use that, too.

Finally, the ship pops open. The noise and flash of movement alerts him, and he fires at the ship again—but Revan has managed to get it running, and the shields flicker to life before his shots land.

“No reinforcements!” Revan shouts with glee as the cockpit slides shut. “Good luck with those damages, though.”

Luckily, the shuttle’s controls are intuitive, and she gets it into the air with no serious damages. Down below, the commander is attempting to get the base’s heavy artillery running, but Revan is too quick for that; she throws out a salute, winks, and hits the hyperspace controls, and then she’s out of range.

She does manage to pull the coordinates of the  _ Basilisk _ from her mind, though by now it is swimming with pain and exhaustion. The hyperspace jump from this juncture to her flagship is fast, less than an hour, and she sticks an adrenal in her thigh to keep her awake. With this concussion, she doesn’t trust sleep, and she needs to let her ship know that it’s her inside this stolen Mandalorian shuttle. Even with that, by the time she pulls it out of hyperspace to find the  _ Basilisk _ and half her fleet looming before her, her vision is swimming, and not even the comforting darkness of her old mask, now sitting snug on her face, is helping.

At least she is close enough to reach out over the bond, though she is too tired to pass across anything but vague images. She catches fear and worry in response, but she is barely upright, and she can’t make sense of any of it. The  _ Basilisk’s _ hangar doors slide open, and she cobbles together enough cognitive function to land the shuttle with relatively minor damage to her flagship, then pops open the cockpit and hauls herself out. That proves to be a mistake; the moment her foot hits the ground, her entire leg buckles, and only through a well-placed protrusion on the shuttle’s exterior does she keep herself from landing on the ground.

Someone says her name, then repeats it. Alek—she can feel him in the Force, and there he is, emerging from the nearest turbolift and running towards her. He’s saying something else, but Revan doesn’t comprehend the words, only sharp panic. Her head is spinning even more, and her vision has gone far darker than her mask’s visor warrants, and her skull feels like it’s splitting open.   
“I have a concussion,” she tries to say. The sounds that come out are… strangely slurred. No. No, she can talk. It isn’t that bad. It  _ can’t _ be that bad.

Another bolt of pain drives sharp points through her head, and for a moment, she wavers on the edge of unconsciousness before her knees finally give out and she hits the floor of the hangar.

The battle with Mandalore the Ultimate is long over by the time Revan is released from her kolto tank, no longer wincing at every noise or collapsing when she tries to stand. She escapes the medbay and is halfway up to the command deck before Alek catches her and drags her back despite her protests. She can stand and her head doesn’t hurt; what more do they want? She needs to be back on the  _ Basilisk’s _ deck. Even if she missed the battle, even if Mandalore escaped, they still won a victory. This one brings a huge swath of the Mid Rim back under the control of the Republic. The Mandalorians are being pushed back by the day now, and Revan cannot afford to fall behind.

Alek gives her the battle report after he manages to wrestle her back into the medbay, seeing as it is the only thing that has half a chance of keeping her in bed. His eye for strategy has improved over the war, and while Revan counts a few openings he didn’t take that she would have, he won the battle and sent Mandalore running back to whatever planets he is still holding onto. Most of the fleet had no idea that Revan wasn’t aboard the  _ Basilisk _ , and that alone speaks to his skill.

“Maybe I’ll give you your own section of the fleet,” she says, amused, when Alek is finished giving her the rundown. He rolls his eyes. The refrain is familiar, but they both know he’ll never have any ship but the  _ Basilisk _ . He has his command, and it is at her side as it always has been.

Somewhere between Alek’s second and third lectures, Revan learns thirdhand that her intel, both that which she gathered on the mission and the datastick she stole from the hidden base, has made its way to command while she was in the kolto. Chancellor Cressa had sent out a division to the hidden planet Revan had crashed, but when they landed, the base had been evacuated. The Republic had gotten some intelligence, and for that, Revan is grateful. The other pieces of information, the ones that had required the presence of Revan herself to obtain—those had gone straight to a Senate task force. Revan can be content that the carefully-compiled list of traitors and corrupt officials selling Republic battle plans to the Mandalorians will be studied and acted upon and that her strike team didn’t die for nothing.

Revan wasn’t supposed to be on that mission, truth be told. She was supposed to stay with the Basilisk while a team of three operatives and one Jedi went into the field. But she hadn’t been able to find a Jedi who could be spared from their positions on the eve of a battle the likes of which they just fought, and she wanted to see that treachery firsthand, so she had placed herself on the mission at the eleventh hour. Alek had been cross to say the least; Revan isn’t an unknown figure with her mask and her blue and gold lightsabers, and so when she boarded the shuttle, she had been wearing a rebreather that hid most of her face and a single blue lightsaber hanging from her belt. It was enough to disguise her, but she has missed the security of her mask and her two blades, the way her kyber crystals sing at her.

Mandalore’s grip on the galaxy is weakening. The next few months will decide the war. Revan knows it as much as she has ever known anything. She should be rejoicing. Cressa is more and more cheerful every time she speaks to him these days, and the Revanchists—tired of war and eager to return to their previous lives—greet her happily when she passes them in the corridors of the  _ Basilisk _ or when she comes aboard the other ships in her fleet. Even Master Arren, assigned to a scout ship and well-used to battles, seems lighter on the scattered occasions when she speaks to Revan.

She should be happy. Two years of combat have drained her, and she will be only too glad to finally defeat Mandalore and send his people running. She should be  _ ecstatic. _ But her visions are coming faster now, no longer separated by months or years but by weeks if she is lucky, and a shadow hangs over the galaxy. She hasn’t rested easy since she was eighteen and shivering in the rain on Dantooine and the Force was whispering  _ danger _ in her ear.

A hand comes up to touch her sternum beneath her robes. Her oldest kyber crystal hasn’t lain there for five years, but the motion is as easy as breathing, and the habit has lingered long after she built her second lightsaber. If she is being honest with herself, she has no idea what is coming. That uncertainty makes doubt creep through her whenever she stops to think about it.

And that doubt leads nowhere good.

(Sometimes, when she has almost lost a battle and thousands of soldiers are dead at her feet, she thinks back to that council chamber, to the furious certainty with which she and Alek spoke to them and their own refusal to fight. Sometimes, Revan begins to wonder if they knew something she did not—if they thought that this war was not what it seemed. If that was why they kept the Jedi away and let them stand back and gather strength as the Republic died.

But she remembers Sefbu and fifty-seven bodies lying in the mud, and she remembers Cathar and a sea filled with so many bones they cracked like twigs underfoot, and she remembers every world the Mandalorians razed, all those billions dead because the Republic couldn’t fight back fast enough and because mere hundreds of Jedi joined them, half of them dead by now. It doesn’t matter what the High Council might have known. They are Jedi, and their duty is clear.)

Revan needs to end this war decisively. No matter how many times she pushes the Mandalorians back, they will fight to the last. If this Mandalore dies, another will rise up to take his place. The same has happened with his highest generals. She needs a victory so overwhelming it forces their surrender. She needs to prove her strength.

She needs a weapon.

Mireya has ingrained herself more and more with the technicians and other support personnel as the war has worn on. Now, even as Revan’s second top commander, she goes into the field only during major battles, preferring to direct strategic moves from behind Revan’s lines. She has built up her expertise in technology, and if anyone can manage to come up with a weapon that can end the fight against the Mandalorians, it will be her and her team.

She reaches for the comm at her belt and rings Mireya. When the padawan greets her, she returns it, then pauses.

“Mireya,” she starts, “I need something built…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Is this mostly a filler chapter? Yes, absolutely. Do I care? No. I needed something written about two years into the war and I wanted shenanigans and Canderous Ordo. The Mass Shadow Generator does make its first appearance here, so there's that.  
> Next chapter is Dxun, and while I'm going to have tremendous fun writing it, it's going to be much less fun for Revan and her army. We are nearing the end stretch here: only four more chapters after this one, and the final two cover Malachor.  
> Anyway, enjoy. Kudos and comments are very appreciated, and I love rambling about Revan and her slow downfall. See y'all whenever the next chapter comes out.


	8. Ineluctable

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _She looks half Mandalorian as it is, in black beskar edged in red and with black robes swirling around her thighs. She is blood and darkness against Cassus Fett’s bright gold, a faceless mask against his abandoned helmet. The contrast seems to amuse him.  
>  He pulls the beskar spear from his back and grins widely, blood coating half his face.  
> “Come on, then. Warrior to warrior, just the two of us, Revan. Show me why the Mandalorians fear you.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ineluctable (adj): unable to be resisted or avoided; inescapable.

For a thousand years and more, humans have lived on Onderon. For all those years, the shining spires of Iziz have towered over them. Even from the air, the sight of that city—the only city on Onderon, fortified to defend against beasts from the moon of Dxun—takes Revan’s breath away. After decades of bombardment and war, the city is tarnished and stained with the blood of thousands, and yet when Revan looks at it, she can see the centuries built into its stones and sloping streets.

On Dxun, the Demon Moon of Onderon, payloads of droids and soldiers will be hitting the ground soon. The Mandalorians have been entrenched on Dxun for decades in secret, and Revan is not expecting this to be an easy victory. This is Mandalore’s last stronghold in the Inner Rim, and he intends to hold it as strongly as Revan is attempting to seize it from him. Revan hopes her widespread assault might break their lines before most of her Jedi come in, but even with Mireya on the front lines poking for weaknesses in a hundred places and even with Alek’s few units dropped deep in Mandalorian territory, a nasty itch has settled under Revan’s skin. With Mandalore and Cassus Fett both here, anything that can go wrong likely will.

Thousands of Republic troops will break themselves against the Mandalorians on Onderon, and even more on Dxun. This might be the bloodiest battle that Revan will ever fight. But she will win it. She will tear the Mandalorians out with her own bare hands and she will send them running.

Somewhere in the jungle of the moon orbiting above Revan’s head, Alek is trekking through a forest hunting for Mandalorian commanders. Being so far separated from him with no communication between them unnerves her, but it serves its purpose. The Mandalorians will assume that he and Revan are fighting together as they always do, and so none of them will turn towards Onderon to find her. Revan needs exactly that.

Cassus Fett is on Onderon, and Revan is going to kill him. No prisoners, no second chances. Fett dies today.

Revan isn’t alone. Three Jedi, fierce fighters who take to stealth easily, stand at her back. In all likelihood, they will die before the battle is out, but for now, she takes comfort in the small amount of aid they might provide. She may need them before the end.

On Dxun, half of Revan’s army is dying in a crusade just this side of hopeless. Here on Onderon, Revan’s boots hit the ground deep within the jungle and far enough from Iziz that her presence won’t be clocked, and she climbs onto her speeder and takes off.

Most of the Republic has no idea that Fett is on Onderon, but Revan’s last-minute reviews paid off when she noticed his characteristic formations on the eve of battle. After hours of poring over maps of Onderon and Dxun, tracking every troop formation that she could and making guesses at half an army’s worth of others, she managed to narrow Fett’s location down to an area north of Iziz. Now she focuses on her holomap and the area she has highlighted in red and turns her speeder towards it. Behind her, she hears the telltale hum of the other Jedi doing the same. They will have to skirt Iziz from a distance to avoid detection, but four Jedi unburdened by soldiers can do that easily.

Revan has never been this close to Fett. After more than two and a half years of warfare, after she has seen firsthand the massacres he has unleashed, after Ketaris and Razari and Quelii, Revan is no longer hunting him as an enemy commander, some monument to the Mandalorians for her to dismantle. What is swirling through her veins now is more than certainty, more than fury. She is no Jedi in this moment of distended time, an empty jungle stretching out before her.

Revan has come for vengeance.

The first Mandalorian trap springs mere minutes into Revan’s trek. One moment, the jungle is quiet with the hum of wildlife and the engines of the speeders, and then the Force screams _move_ and Revan twists her speeder to the side as hard as she can and the silence implodes as fire flares bright in the air. Revan feels the Jedi die before her eyes catch on the mangled remains of his speeder, and she hears one of the others whisper a quiet blessing.

 _May the Force protect his soul,_ Revan allows herself to think as she kicks her speeder back into gear. Within a few minutes, the corpse has been swallowed up by the jungle once more, and Revan does not let her thoughts linger on it any longer.

That death will not be the first.

Her speeder eats up miles of ground, racing over the treacherous paths as fast as she can take it. Only through the Force does she manage to avoid meeting an end here; countless times, vines or branches reach for her, and the paths twist so abruptly that Revan often has to turn before she can even see the bend to avoid careening into a tree. The longer she goes, the more the Force grows restless, until it becomes a constant buzz beneath the surface of her skin.

It takes nearly an hour to reach the densely-wooded area north of Iziz. They run across a few more traps, though none claim any lives, and they grow closer and closer to the areas Revan has marked in glowing red on her holomap. Revan can feel the other Jedi and their growing unease, but she cannot— _will_ not—abandon this mission. This is more than her Jedi now, more than even her.

Alek has long since vanished into Dxun’s dead zone, where no comms can reach, but Mireya is still well within range, and like clockwork, she rings Revan on the hour to give her a report. Revan is hoping for good news, but the padawan’s voice is laden with exhaustion and defeat.

 _“We’re at half our numbers, Revan,”_ she says, and when she stares at Revan’s mask, her face looks too old for a girl who isn’t quite nineteen. _“All remaining troops are spread out on hundreds of fronts. I’m looking for their weaknesses, but we just don’t have the numbers. The Mandalorians have been entrenched here for decades, and it shows.”_

“Keep on that front,” Revan orders. “I’m doing what I can down here, but I need you to break them.”

 _“I don’t know if I can,”_ Mireya replies. Her image shakes as an explosion rings out, and she disconnects with a violent curse. Revan pauses and looks skyward at Dxun. Enough blood has spilled there today that she can feel its echo from Onderon, and her crusade is far from over. If Mireya can hold her lines and root out Mandalore’s weakness, the Republic will win—and of all the troops that set foot here, Revan will be lucky if one in five makes it home by the battle’s end.

She has known what the death toll of this battle might be ever since she told the Supreme Chancellor that they needed to strike here before the war could end. She has to make that sacrifice count.

Signs of passage begin to appear across the jungle as time wears on even further. Broken branches, heat signatures in Revan’s HUD, even a broken speeder of Mandalorian design. The Force’s dull warning begins to grow— _threat,_ it hisses, and Revan pushes the speeder to its breaking point. Fett is so close she can taste it.

The silence of the jungle breaks for a second time. A single shot rings out and Revan is moving faster than lightning before it can hit her, ducking behind the nearest log, only it doesn’t come after her, doesn’t pierce her flesh or ricochet off her stolen breastplate and its freshly-painted beskar. When Revan peers over the top of the log, she realizes why.

The second Jedi is lying dead on the ground, knocked clean off her speeder by a sniper’s shot. Right over her heart, her brown robes are charred and blackened. Revan exchanges a glance with the only Jedi left standing and ignites her sabers to stand at his back. The forest is still—too still. No birds, no animals, not even the drone of insects, just the hissing of lightsabers as Revan and the Jedi stand back-to-back.

A twig cracks and Revan spins around, only to hear a low voice from behind her. Not the voice of the Jedi, she realizes with mounting horror, but a voice she has heard only over holoterminal and in low-quality holovids from battlefields long since cooled.

“Hello, Revan,” says Cassus Fett, his golden armor gleaming as he steps from the jungle. “Come to kill me?”

The Mandalorians only ever use her name. No title, no honorific, no surname, just Revan. In their mouths, it comes to be something more than a name. To them, Revan is a worthy adversary, and that is the highest praise they can offer anyone. 

Revan doesn’t want their praise. She wants their heads, Fett’s especially.

“Yes,” Revan snarls in response. The other Jedi glances sideways at her and adjusts his grip as his green blade wavers.

Fett has drawn a pair of blasters, and he is standing close enough that deflecting his first few carefully-aimed shots takes considerable skill. His frenetic movements are enough to push the two Jedi back by several feet before Revan manages to regain her footing. He has been trained in how to fight a Jedi; that much is clear as day. Mandalore picks his generals well.

Blasters won’t save him from lightsabers, though. Revan and the other Jedi manage to stop his advance, and Revan begins to push back. No amount of martial skill can help him against the Force—she slams him back, and though he is remarkably quick to recover his balance, Revan has taken back the ground she lost.

Before Revan can stop him, the other Jedi throws himself towards Fett as Fett aims fire at Revan. Lightsaber pointed straight towards Fett, he comes close enough that Revan thinks he might strike a blow, only for his blade to bounce off golden beskar. He cannot recover in time. Fett slams a fist into his unarmored side and Revan hears a sharp crack. The Jedi goes down hard, though his Force signature remains bright.

“Is this really the best you have?” Fett asks. His voice is dripping with derision as he steps past the Jedi’s prone form.

“You never had a high opinion of us anyway. I don’t see how I’m supposed to care,” Revan spits back. Her next blow lands, though Fett’s beskar gauntlets deflect it easily.

“If Mandalore surrounded himself by such pitiful warriors, you would have marched into his camp and taken him apart already, and we would have welcomed it. Weakness like this has no place on a battlefield.”

Revan twists her foot against the ground and strikes out, her limbs flowing through the familiar forms of Jar’Kai in a complicated attack that sends Fett reeling. At least he has stopped talking now, though she does not read anger from him like she would expect. Instead, he feels almost satisfied.

A feeling in the back of Revan’s head tells her that this is important. Fett always has a plan, and he has not yet shown his hand to Revan yet. She doesn’t trust what a Mandalorian commander is capable of.

Somewhere in the midst of the fight, Fett has picked up a strangely-shaped metal sword, one Revan has encountered a few times among other high-ranking Mandalorians. He tosses his blasters to the side and hefts it; the edge catches the sunlight, and Revan realizes that it is edged in beskar. In his off hand, a hexagonal dagger gleams in the dappled jungle light. He’s barely taller than Revan, but much heavier, and the force of his blows sends her staggering. The dagger slices through her robes more than once, and Revan’s lightsabers strike the beskar edge of the sword time and time again. Fett never gains the upper hand, but Revan’s advantage is narrow as long as he has his weapons.

Fett appears to recognize this. His movements grow tighter and more controlled as he seeks out a weakness in Revan’s defenses, and he doesn’t speak again. Revan has never liked overly talkative opponents, so she takes in the silence and finds the imperfections in Fett’s defenses. He is used to blocking against knives and swords, not lightsabers, and though none of her blows land on unprotected flesh, the way she turns off her blades to slip inside his defenses sets him on edge.

Revan dredges up all her rage and lets it ignite her. Her lightsabers crackle against beskar; the weight of her strikes forces Fett back inch by inch, until it takes all that he has to move his sword and dagger in time to block her.

Today, Revan will taste triumph. She is certain of it. A Mandalorian is nothing against a trained Jedi Knight, and Fett is losing.

She is so utterly sure of the way this fight will go that not even the Force’s warning saves her from an underhanded blow to her legs that sends her sprawling on the forest floor. For a moment, Fett stands above her, silhouetted in light, and then he throws something at her feet and her vision explodes in a flash of blinding white.

“I expected a longer fight,” he calls from somewhere up ahead, though Revan finds with sinking horror that she can’t see even a shadow. The faint noise of a speeder engine reaches her ears, but by the time her eyes begin to pick out hazy shapes, no sign of him remains.

A faint groan startles Revan, and she squints enough to see the other Jedi shifting among the leaves. He tries to sit up, but a sharp spike of pain and fear rises off of him.

“Stay still,” Revan orders him. He will be of no help to her now, and she has no gift for healing.

The Jedi looks like he wants to protest, but Revan freezes him in place with a look. Likely broken ribs, possibly a broken leg—he was no match for Cassus Fett, and he had no idea how to fight alongside Revan without watching her every move. Revan no longer trains with the other Jedi, only Alek and Mireya, and so she only fights with them, too.

“He… went west,” the Jedi coughs out, reaching a shaking hand to point deep into the jungle. Revan nods at him and pulls the one still-functioning speeder towards her.

She may have lost Fett, but this chase will end today on Onderon.

Revan’s speeder takes off less than a minute behind Fett, but in this jungle, that minute could mean everything. She has to double back twice when she realizes that his speeder has taken a path she failed to pick out originally. Her detours and lost trails mean that by the time she is firmly on the correct path, Fett is far enough ahead of her that Revan fails to see him or to hear more than a faint whir of engines every few seconds. Blood is pounding in her ears; she pilots through the Force alone, the world blurring into a green mockery of the stars before a hyperspace jump. She is almost less than solid in these unfocused minutes.

And then ahead of her—a clearing opens up and Revan halts her speeder so quickly she has to vault from it, the forward momentum carrying her into a roll. When she rises from her crouch, she catches a gleam of gold, and there he stands. Cassus Fett, speeder long discarded, feet set in a wide stance. He has discarded his sword and knife and stands unarmed, but Revan sees a long, thin length over one shoulder. A spear, beskar in all likelihood.

Fett has discarded his helmet somewhere along the line. Dark-skinned, dark-eyed, and dark-haired, a long scar running across the bridge of a nose that has been broken more than once, he is nothing more than human. Just another man, and Revan has killed men before.

“I was worried you wouldn’t be able to find me,” Fett says. He is grinning, and that grin, that flash of white teeth, makes wrath boil up inside her.

“You think too highly of your skills,” she replies, low and furious. For more than two and a half years, Cassus Fett has been her enemy. Now he will never be anything but a man.

Revan sets her feet in the first stance of Jar’Kai—master at eighteen, the youngest in the Jedi Order’s history, the greatest duelist Dantooine ever produced—and readies herself. Her lightsabers are singing soft and rage-filled in her heart, and the Force’s fear-filled whispers are only growing.

“Take off your mask,” he calls. “I know exactly where you got it, Revan. Let me see the face of my most worthy enemy.”

And he will never see her face, but her mute refusal and her tightening fists only make him smile wider.

She looks half Mandalorian as it is, in black beskar edged in red and with black robes swirling around her thighs. She is blood and darkness against Cassus Fett’s bright gold, a faceless mask against his abandoned helmet. The contrast seems to amuse him.

He pulls the beskar spear from his back and grins widely, blood coating half his face.

“Come on, then. Warrior to warrior, just the two of us, Revan. Show me why the Mandalorians fear you.”

Revan digs her toes into the ground and ignites her lightsabers, and Fett is on her almost before she can block the blow. Beskar _rings_ , and the forest breaks open, and Revan loses herself to the unconscious movements of the duel.

As good as Fett might have been with the sword and dagger, it becomes clear that this spear is his favored weapon. He wields it as lightly as she does her lightsabers, and though it makes his blows easier to predict, he is adept enough to block her swings time and time again.

The spear’s dull end comes flying at her stomach and Revan barely manages to twist far enough away to avoid it. That motion opens a weakness in Fett’s armor just below his shoulder, but he is already settling back into a ready stance before Revan can take advantage of it. The beskar on her chest makes her movements slower and heavier than usual, and she begins to regret not training with it more often.

Fett slams out with one end of the spear, then the other; Revan blocks each blow with a single lightsaber. He is testing her defenses just as she has been watching his.

Revan gathers all her emotions below her skin and lets them armor her muscles and strengthen her bones. The Force answers to her, and her lightsabers answer to her, and almost three years of frustration and death answer when she calls them.

Fett wants a fight. Revan will show him one. At his next move, she ducks beneath the spear and sends a sharp blow towards one wrist, breaking his grip on the beskar. He barely recovers in time to push her back before she can get her lightsabers up, and his expression has sharpened when Revan finally breaks away. He looks _eager_ now.

Revan doesn’t give him a chance to recover. She strikes again—once, twice, and spinning for a third blow that has her blades crossed against the spear. In a contest of strength, she cannot win; she lets the blades flare out and uses Fett’s forward momentum to send him sprawling forward. It’s a dirty move, the kind that got her yelled at back among the Jedi, but there is no fighting dirty in this war. There is victory, and there is defeat, and Revan does not intend to lose.

This time, when Fett hefts the spear, it doesn’t spin so lightly in his fingers. Revan’s movement sent him to one knee, and dirt is still clinging to him when he thrusts the spear point towards her side where the beskar does not reach. Seeing that golden armor tarnished makes Revan smile razor-sharp.

But instead of grimacing, Fett barks out a laugh.

“Now you’re fighting,” he chokes out. His teeth are red with blood.

Revan replies by slamming her foot into the ground and unleashing a wave of power that sends him flying backwards. He doesn’t quite manage to catch himself this time, though a tree breaks his fall before he goes too far. The spear dangles from one hand; he winces as he brings it into his proper hold.

“Enough of a fight for you?” Revan says. Her voice is as chilled as the surface of Hoth, but Fett only shakes his head and smiles.

“You would have conquered the galaxy as one of us.” He almost sounds sorrowful.

Revan slams her blades into the spear, and once more, they are back to exchanging blows.

Revan might have the Force to draw on, but Fett does not. Each movement is imperceptibly weaker than the last, and when he misses an opening Revan would have taken in a heartbeat, she knows that he has exhausted himself. From now on, it is only a matter of time.

When Fett brings his spear down in an overhand blow that leaves Revan’s arms shaking, she does not break it instantly. She lets him lean in, lets him press his weight down against the beskar until it takes all she has to hold him off. Just a few seconds more and she will strike.

And then—

And then he opens his mouth.

“I wonder,” he says, as though they’re speaking across a table, “if that Jedi of yours is dead yet.”

Revan stops. No. No, he can’t be talking about Alek. He has to be talking about the one she left back in the forest with his cracked ribs and blood-flecked lips. Not Alek, _not him—_

“He should be walking into our trap fairly soon. Right in the middle of the dead zone, yes? All alone up there, with no support, and far out of your reach. You hardly ever leave his side, so we had to take the first chance we could.”

“No. You’re lying. You’re _lying!”_ He can’t be telling the truth, not when she can barely feel Alek at the back of her mind and he’s too far away to speak to, not when she hasn’t spoken to him since they parted ways far above Onderon and she told him she’d see him when the battle was won, not when Dxun is red with Republic blood.

For a moment, his face shifts into something that almost looks like _pity._

“You only had one obvious weakness, Revan. I wanted to see just how far you’d go.”

She _screams_ for Alek as loudly as she can inside her head but there is nothing, no response, just a faint flash of terror, and that fear _explodes_ inside of her, out of her, through her lightsabers until she’s pushing Fett up and off of her.

Time stops.

The spear glints.

And Revan’s lightsaber slices down as fast as her hands can carry it. Fett can’t hope to stop her, can’t move the spear even close to fast enough, and then it’s spinning out of his grip and he’s staggering back, clutching a hand to his shoulder, and his arm—still plated in golden beskar—lies twitching on the forest floor.

“You’re lying,” Revan says, and the steel of her voice is almost enough to give her pause. “And I am going to kill you for it.”

Fett is leaning against a tree, chest heaving. The lightsaber has cauterized his arm enough that he is barely bleeding, but pain wraps around him like a cloud and for a moment, Revan wants nothing more than to tighten its grip, to make him _writhe_ before he dies.

But he is laughing despite the blood on his face, and Revan is still terrified. If he isn’t lying…

Revan’s comm rings. She answers it in a haze.

 _“Oh, Force, Revan, you need to come to Dxun._ ” Mireya’s face is pale even over holo, one cheek streaked with blood or dirt or worse. _“Something’s gone wrong—get that karking gun down! Revan, you don’t understand. We—there’s a trap. If I leave the front, we’ll lose this blasted battle. But Alek’s about to walk straight into a group of Mandalorians that outnumber him ten to one. He’s going to die, and we can’t get him a message. You’re the only one who can reach him in time.”_

The Force has reached a crescendo, and when Revan looks over the comm to Fett, he is laughing.

Mireya’s holo flickers out as Revan gives her a single nod.

“I’m not a liar, Revan,” he says, eyes closed against the pain. “Not to you. You’ve earned my honesty.”

Revan takes a step back, then another.

“I came here to kill you,” she answers, though she no longer feels any measure of certainty. The fear, the anger, they’re eating her alive.

“If you stay long enough to kill me, your Jedi will die. You know it as well as I do. Make a choice, Revan.”

There was never any choice to make. Revan turns around and breaks out into a run.

“Hey!”

And there astride the speeder Revan thought was broken is the other Jedi. His face is pale with pain, but he is strong enough to stand as Revan comes to a halt in front of him.

“What are you doing?” he demands.

“Get out of my way.” She moves to push past him, but he stands firm.

“You can’t just leave him there! Sir, that man is second to Mandalore in terms of power. You’ve been hunting him for years!” he exclaims, gesturing behind her to where Fett is still leaning against a tree.

“Then kill him yourself!” Revan snaps. “I need to get to Dxun. I need to get to Alek.”

Dawning comprehension writes horror on the Jedi’s face, and Revan realizes she might have just made a mistake.

“You’re abandoning the face of the Mandalorian army,” he says. “To save one man. You’re abandoning everything. You’re willing to give up your victory right now?”

“I would give up more than Cassus Fett for him. Now move!”

Those are the wrong words to say. The Jedi doesn’t shift, only lifts the lightsaber from his belt in trembling hands.

“I’m sorry, commander,” he says softly. “I’m not going to let you do that.”

“You don’t have the power to stop me,” Revan answers, and her lightsabers spark to life. She doesn’t want to fight this Jedi, but _nothing_ is going to keep her from warning Alek before he walks into a trap.

Revan lands the first blow. The Jedi barely stays on his feet, and Revan grits her teeth and _pushes_ him with all the strength of the Force, sends him flying back into the clearing. He lands hard; for a moment, she hopes he won’t get up, but he staggers to his knees and lets the green blade in his hands flicker on. He looks horrified when he stands.

“How can you do this?” he asks, voice breaking. “How can you turn your back on your duty? We followed you out of loyalty, and you sent us to our deaths for half a shot at victory. And now you’re letting that victory walk away? If any other Jedi were up there, you would let them die and not think twice about it.”

 _Alek is worth more than any of you ever will be,_ she doesn’t say, though she is thinking it.

“Fett is right there! Right behind you! If you want that victory, _take it!”_ Revan cries, hysterical. She needs to leave before it’s too late.

“I—”

The silvered point of a beskar spear erupts from his chest. For a brief moment, he just freezes wide-eyed with betrayal scrawled across his face before Cassus Fett pulls the spear out again and the Jedi collapses.

“I… trusted you,” he whispers with his dying breath, and for the second time, Revan and Fett are left to face each other.

“No other options, Revan. Stop me or save your _jetii_ . Whatever choice you make, _you_ are going to live with the consequences. No one else.”

Fett’s skin is ashen with pain. As he looks at Revan, he is more serious than he has been since she landed in this clearing.

Revan turns her back on him and runs.

By the time Revan finds a shuttle and crosses through into Dxun’s atmosphere, the Force is a maelstrom of hurt and fear and wrath. She doesn’t even land the shuttle, just lets it crash and leaps free thirty feet above the ground, straight into the heart of the dead zone. She knows exactly where Alek is supposed to be, and the bond is growing taut, and Revan doesn’t need a speeder as she leaps from tree to tree, a blur of black and red.

She needs to make it in time. She cannot lose him here with thousands dead around them. Not Alek, not after everything—she loves him too much for that.

But by the time Revan finds Alek, a full third of his men are dead, and in the gloom of Dxun, his lightsaber is flashing like a beacon. He has walked straight into the waiting Mandalorians, and though he is fighting for his life, he is outnumbered too severely; as Revan watches him amidst a cluster of soldiers, that blue blade goes out.

For a moment, Revan is so terrified that every muscle in her body freezes, until she registers that the steady pulse of Alek’s presence has not left her mind, has only dimmed. She can feel him deep in the battle, unconscious but not dead.

Not dead.

Revan launches herself into the fray. She cuts through six before they notice her, pulls apart the grenades on the belts of two squadrons with nothing but fury and the Force. She has ripped them half to pieces before they even start shooting back, and by then the bursts of heat passing by her helmet mean little and less to her.

The twin arcs of her sabers light up the jungle gloom. Dxun is so dark Revan is little more than a shadow come to life as she moves through them—snipers in trees, clusters of commandos perched on speeders, warriors in full beskar who die clutching their throats as their blood turns molten beneath blue-gold blades.

She cannot hope to destroy them all, but she will kill as many as she can. She needs to get to Alek, needs to get him out of here before he dies alongside his soldiers. Revan will not let him fall here.

More than one Republic soldier fires on her before they register the lightsabers in her hands and the mask covering her face. She doesn’t bother correcting them, just deflects the blaster bolts with the Force or her lightsabers and presses through the battle until there, lying in a pile of mud-soaked bodies, she sees a flash of red that isn’t blood and feels him and the indistinct hum of his lightsaber lying half-buried in the muck.

Alek. She lands on her knees, ignoring the chill of the mud and the uncomfortable wetness that spreads across her legs, and crawls the final distance to his side. The soldiers barely notice her, too busy with their fight; she presses bare fingers to his face and reaches out for his consciousness. It slips out of her grip before she can do more than reassure herself that he’ll be alright.

 _Wake up,_ she begs silently, but he doesn’t move. The mud chills Revan, and the fog covering Dxun is beginning to eat at her, and all of a sudden, the past few hours—the hunt for Fett, her first duel, the second one, the _Jedi_ —they all slam into her with a hopelessness that sends her reeling.

Revan will never be able to save these soldiers. Their Force signatures are going out like candles in a cold wind, one after another after a third. There was never any hope for them. But Sith _hells_ , she can save Alek, and that’s enough.

That has to be enough.

A stray blaster bolt comes racing towards her and Revan spins on her heels as fast as she can, crouching over Alek’s body to knock it away before switching off her lightsabers. If the Mandalorians begin to notice her and her sabers, she will be in even bigger danger. By now, they have all but overwhelmed Alek’s team. Revan has scant minutes before the soldiers will all be dead and she will be left alone against an ambush she could not hope to fight through. She grits her teeth and stares down at Alek. He shows no sign of movement beyond a flicker beneath his eyelids.

 _Force forgive me for this,_ she prays, though today is not a day for pardon.

Revan leaves the soldiers to their fate.

Hauling Alek through the woods takes all the strength she has left. He is neither small nor light, and all that dead weight makes Revan stumble more than once. Exhaustion is dripping from her skin, and her power is all but drained; she can barely muster up enough to allow her to carry him. She walks until her legs are shaking with the effort and the battle is lost deep in the darkness behind her (until she can no longer feel her soldiers dying for a conquest Revan can no longer promise their cold corpses). More than once, she has to duck into the undergrowth to avoid a passing Mandalorian patrol, and she catches her own name from their lips three times.

In a strange moment of lucidity, Revan glances up at Onderon’s green surface now hanging above her head. She wonders absently how far Fett has gotten or if he is off the planet now—if giving him up was worth it, worth the deaths of all the Jedi who fought at her side, worth almost losing Alek.

Revan has given more for smaller victories, but that sacrifice will never be Alek. Not when Revan has air in her lungs.

As soon as she notices the light on her comm blinking blue instead of red, she taps a faintly quivering finger against it and calls Mireya. They are miles from where they started, and Revan knows hours must have passed—Mireya will be either furious or terrified, likely both. And true to form, when she appears in miniature on Revan’s holocomm, her face is white with worry.

 _“Where are you?”_ she demands. _“You dropped off the map. We couldn’t track you or get any sort of location off of you for hours.”_

“Lock onto my coordinates,” Revan says. She can hear the fatigue in her own voice, and Mireya clearly can, too. She immediately shouts for a tech and passes him terse instructions.

_“Do you need a medic? Is Alek with you?”_

“Yes to both. If you can, hurry. The Mandalorians are hunting us.”

Mireya nods and moves to end the call, then pauses.

 _“Revan, what happened down on Onderon?”_ she asks hesitantly. _“Could you find Fett?”_

“Fett escaped,” Revan answers tersely. “I couldn’t get to him in time.”

She hangs up before Mireya can ask her anything else.

The transport that eventually finds them takes several more minutes to land, and by the time it does, Alek is awake enough to ask her what happened, though he is still somewhat delirious. Revan answers what she can and avoids the rest, and when the medics collect them both, he has lapsed back into unconsciousness. Probable concussion, one medic says, likely a few other injuries. He offers to look Revan over and she refuses as vehemently as she can. She will not show her face to them, not now.

Revan lets the conversation blur around her as the evac shuttle takes off. For several minutes, she hovers on the edge of sleep; she hasn’t experienced a burnout like this in months at the shortest, and she knows that she’ll likely sleep for days when she is allowed to rest. The Force’s murmur has dulled, and Revan is almost asleep when a scrap of conversation jolts her back awake again.

“—dropped on Iziz,” one of the medics is saying quietly to the other.

“Whose orders?”

“Mandalore’s, probably, but they came from Fett’s flagship, or so I heard.”

“What? What happened?” Revan asks, her tiredness evaporating like morning mist. The medics exchange a glance.

“The Mandalorians retreated just before you got ahold of General Surik, sir. Apparently Mandalore gave the order to evacuate once we’d won the battle,” one says. It should be good news, but dread has settled in Revan’s gut. Fett always has a trap. Even if Revan took his arm, he would never walk off Onderon without scraping out some shred of victory. He would never leave a planet and its moon to her while he stands.

“He bombed Iziz,” she mutters, but by the way the other medic closes her eyes, she knows it’s true.

“Right before the Mandalorian fleet jumped into hyperspace, he released a payload. Death tolls are in the thousands already, and they’re likely to double or triple by final count,” the woman says. Her light blue skin is pale beneath gold tattoos.

Fett bombed Iziz. Fett bombed Iziz because Revan let him live. Thousands of civilians just died, and their blood is on Revan’s hands.

 _You are going to live with the consequences,_ he had told her, and nothing had been too great a cost for Alek’s life, but now—

Revan doesn’t speak again until the shuttle lands in Mireya’s makeshift camp and she no longer has to think about the choices she just made. She loses herself in the work of commanding the remnants of her broken forces—the Mandalorians may have retreated, but Revan has lost three quarters of her army, and that is a generous guess. She does what she can to clean up and direct them. Giving orders helps distract her from what she doesn’t want to acknowledge and the position that Fett forced her into, and by the time her forces have cleared off of Dxun, Alek is awake and Revan turns her focus to him instead.

No one has asked her about Onderon since she returned to them. No one knows or even suspects that she might be lying when she gives a more detailed explanation to Mireya the moment she gets a break.

Iziz is burning, though, and when Revan looks back at it as the final Republic transport leaves the ground of Dxun, the city seems to stare back at her.

 _You did this,_ the Force says, and the alabaster towers of Iziz echo their agreement.

_You did this, Revan. Only you._

Once, years before, Revan saw Coruscant as an escape. Now, as her boots echo in the empty halls of the Senate tower, she can see beneath the veneer of neon lights and buildings that touch the sky. Coruscant is dying, and its decay resonates between Revan’s ribs. She can recognize the sheen of ruin. She has seen it in her mirror every night since Dxun.

Tol Cressa stands in front of the Senate and gives a speech fit for a victory. He says remembrances to the fallen, the thousands of dead that Revan sent to their deaths with all the knowledge of how few would return. He praises Revan’s strategy and Mireya’s determination and Alek’s bravery. He tells stories of how Revan has swept through the galaxy and rained down vengeance and justice on the Mandalorians.

The speech takes twenty minutes to wrap up. Revan has stood still for longer, has waited still for hours, and yet she is itching to flee by the time the first round of applause begins.

Silently, Alek presses his shoulder against hers. Dxun left its mark on him—he is still paler than usual, blue tattoos washing out his skin, dark circles lingering beneath his eyes—but he is alive, and he is alright. Revan lets herself relax into the gesture.

 _I’m alright,_ she murmurs, though Alek looks unconvinced.

_You haven’t been okay since Onderon._

Alek knows that something is wrong. He has known it ever since he woke up with Revan’s hand tight in his. Twice he’s tried to ask her about it, but Revan has given the same story both times. The lie gets easier to tell the more she speaks it, but Alek knows her too well for that.

Revan has never trusted anyone like she trusts Alek, and so she will never tell him about Cassus Fett. He can look around inside her head all she wants, but she has shielded that duel so tightly that she could keep them up even if every other wall in her mind was torn down. No, Alek will not know about Onderon or Dxun or how many soldiers and Jedi Revan left to their deaths.

The Supreme Chancellor beckons them forward and pins medals to their chests when the applause dies down for the final time. For their service in uprooting the Mandalorians from Onderon and Dxun, he says, and the Senate cheers them, and all Revan can see is Cassus Fett leaning against a tree, black eyes staring straight through her mask.

 _Make a choice._ Revan made it, and thousands died, and Cressa thanks her for her service as the blood of his army paints her hands.

She barely manages to speak her hollow thanks. Within the hour, she has fled the Senate and its thousand eyes back to the quarters assigned to her for her brief stay planetside. She wants to be back on the _Basilisk;_ she misses her quarters and the way the ship hums beneath her fingers. She wants to never feel this much life around her. She wants to disappear.

Instead, she throws her medal into a bag of robes and paces. She no longer has the luxury of disappearing. If she takes her mask off—if anyone sees her face—she will fall apart, and she cannot afford that now.

She was summoned by Cressa, but he is not her only business on Coruscant. In three hours, she will stand before the Jedi High Council drenched in all the lives she has not saved and she will pray that they do not brand her _murderer_.

Vrook Lamar still sits on the Council, and as long as he is there, Revan will never be innocent.

The time passes like hyperspace, like cold honey. Revan blinks, and Alek is standing at the door of her quarters asking if she’s ready to go, but Force, every second felt like an infinity while she was within it.

She cannot force herself out the door. For more than two and a half years, she has let herself forget the Jedi Council and the way they sat and condemned the galaxy to darkness. Now, their threat is firm and real and right in front of her. Her mask used to be enough, but even with every speck of skin covered, the Jedi will look at her and see. Razari, Eres III, Onderon and Dxun and the ghosts of Jedi in her wake. They will see, and they will condemn.

“Revan?” Alek prompts.

Revan’s eyes drift over to a pile of discarded robes and a faint glint of metal.

“I’m almost ready.”

The Jedi Temple stands as it always had, a beacon of Light that never pierces the shadows of Coruscant. It would make even the greatest Jedi feel small; as Revan walks through its entrance, she feels like a youngling only just taking her first steps into the galaxy. She hates it. She has always hated it, hated feeling weak.

When the three of them—Revan, Alek, and Mireya—reach the chamber doors of the Jedi Council, a pair of Temple Guardians is standing at the entrance. Faceless, toneless, their anonymity used to confuse Revan when she heard stories of them, but now, she knows the way a mask is a weapon like any other.

“Revan Adarii,” the one on the left intones. Revan inclines her head, and as one, the guardians step aside and let the doors swing open.

The Jedi High Council sits in session within a room stained with the colors of a sunset. They are staring at her as she enters and as Alek and Mireya follow her; one or two look worried, almost afraid, while even more look angry.

“Supreme Commander Adarii,” Vrook Lamar says as she comes to a halt in the middle of the chamber.

Revan shifts and lets sunlight glint off her lightsabers and mask and beskar breastplate.

“Masters,” she answers flatly.

“Why have you come before us?” asks another member, a young white-haired woman who silences Vrook with a look. Echani, Revan realizes, with a shining silver lightsaber hilt on her hip.

“We come to address the status of my third-in-command, General Mireya Surik, padawan of the Jedi Order and former resident of this temple.” Revan’s voice is steady and hard as iron. She will not show this council weakness after she went to war when they refused.

“Do you have a request for the council?” the Echani master asks. Her voice seems too cold for this, and Revan risks as small a look as she can manage at Mireya—the padawan’s face is lined with cold anger as she stares straight at the master.

“I do. I ask that the council allow me to knight Padawan Surik in place of the Jedi acting as her master. I have been acting in his stead since Padawan Surik joined the war, and thus I feel I am the best judge of her abilities and her readiness to be a knight.”

“Why ask us for permission, Supreme Commander? Why have you not done what you do every time you disagree with the Council and simply done what you want? What do we have to do with it?” Master Vrook’s voice drips with scorn as he stares down at Revan, and almost imperceptibly, Alek shifts closer to her side.

“I wish my friend’s knighthood to be legitimate from all angles so _you_ cannot deny it to her when this war is over,” Revan snaps. She has no patience for Vrook’s petty arguments and shallow digs. She endured too many as a young knight.

“Why should we believe that Padawan Surik is ready for knighthood when she has done nothing but serve under you? Your own came far too early.”

And Revan is back on Dantooine at eighteen, her master’s lightsaber slicing her padawan braid from her head, Vrook staring down at her in disdain.

“I passed my trials, master, and Mireya Surik has more than passed hers. Questioning my legitimacy only proves my point.”

“Enough!” cries Master Vandar—Master Vandar, who looked Revan and Alek in the eyes after they saw a massacre and told them not to fight, and Revan has had _enough._

“I am not finished!” she shouts. “You would allow a member of the High Council to question my knighthood when he was present? When he witnessed every one of my trials and pronounced me ready? Or is it because he has thought me arrogant and prideful since I was a child? Vrook Lamar is no judge of character, masters. And he is not unbiased. I want to protect a girl who has saved my life and the lives of thousands of my people more times than I can count from such questioning. She has faced and passed every trial of knighthood more than once in battle. To deny it would be to deny what almost three years of records can confirm. I ask the Council’s approval as a courtesy, not a need.”

Several masters exchange looks.

“We are not questioning your knighthood, Supreme Commander, but your outburst has done nothing to discredit Master Lamar’s opinion of you.” Once more, it is the Echani master who speaks. “How are we to know that you have done your duty as Padawan Surik’s interim master in preparing her for knighthood?”

“She’s done more than you ever did!” Mireya snaps, and her voice is low enough that Revan isn’t sure the master heard her until her blue eyes flash with emotion and she opens her mouth to reply—

“If you don’t trust Revan, then trust me.”

The chamber falls silent. The masters crane their heads to peer at Revan’s side, where Alek steps forward from where he had settled himself in Revan’s blind spot. His words sink into them as their arguments die.

“You might consider Revan prideful or arrogant or whatever else you’ve thrown at her since we were younglings, but I am not Revan, and her faults—real or imagined—are not mine. If you think her judgement to be flawed, then my opinion will not sway you in that regard. So be it. But listen to me. I have fought with Mireya Surik since the Jedi joined the war. I have trained her and battled at her side. I have seen her grow from a padawan to what she is now. She is more than ready to be a knight, and individual masters’ personal vendettas against the knight who has spent the past three years training her have no bearing on that.”

He steps back into place and looks sideways at Revan; he doesn’t smile, but a tendril of steady assurance wraps around the bond, and Revan says her silent thanks in return.

Vrook looks ready to respond to Alek’s barbs, but another master—Kavar, Revan thinks his name is, one Mireya has spoken of more than once—makes an abortive gesture and faces Revan.

“We recognize the points you bring before us, both of you. It is our opinion that in light of these facts, Mireya Surik, Jedi padawan, is fit for knighthood, and that Revan Adarii has acted in the position of her master for long enough to knight her.” Kavar holds Vrook’s gaze as though daring him to contradict the decision, but nothing more is said.

One by one, the members of the council nod, all except for Vrook. The Echani holds Mireya’s gaze as she does; it is clear that they are more familiar that Revan had known, but Mireya is radiating irritation. After this meeting, Revan intends to ask the story behind that.

“Then it is decided,” the Echani says at last. “Supreme Commander Adarii, your petition is granted. You may knight the padawan Mireya Surik with the full blessing and recognition of the Jedi High Council. You are dismissed, all of you. May the Force be with you.”

Revan echoes the farewell, hoping the Council senses exactly how little she means it, and when the doors to the council chamber swing open, she stalks out at the earliest moment, black robes swirling around her legs. She does not want to linger in the Temple any longer than she needs to.

She sags against a pillar the moment she has ducked out of sight of the chamber doors. Speaking to these particular Jedi Masters always exhausts her, and after Dxun, she isn’t patient enough to keep her temper in check. Mireya looks similarly harried. She has history with most of those masters, and though their judgement was favorable, it is clear that the experience has stressed her out.

Alek knocks a shoulder against Revan in an old, familiar question.

“I’m fine,” she murmurs, tipping her head back against the column. He raises an eyebrow, and _gods,_ it draws a smile from Revan.

“You keep saying that.”

“You never believe me.” The easy tangents of their conversation help distract Revan from the way the Jedi Temple presses in over her. It is too large, too full of strangers—Revan reaches for Alek in the Force and holds onto that familiarity until she finds the strength to stand on her own two feet again.

It works, until a cluster of shapes turns the nearest corner and Revan catches a burst of white and then something _else,_ a bitter signature Revan could go without sensing for the rest of her life.

Vrook and the Echani come to a halt a few feet away from Revan and the others. The two masters with them part ways with a nod; the hallway narrows down to the five of them. Mireya pushes off her own pillar and breaks away from Revan and Alek, and the Echani follows her. Revan crosses her arms and stares straight at Vrook, but for once, he does not turn to Revan. Instead, he looks at Alek, and that irritates her even more.

“You had promise, knight,” Vrook states. “I used to wonder where it would take you. And now you’ve squandered it doing the same thing you’ve always done, following someone who doesn’t deserve your loyalty.”

The low current of anger within Alek sparks and flares, and his face twists from the stoic mask he’s worn since the council chambers.

“I follow Revan because she’s my _friend._ She earned my loyalty a hundred times over before we were padawans; it’s more than you’ve ever done. Don’t you dare preach to me about potential when I’ve held together fleets and you’re back on Dantooine sitting on your hands and watching civilians die by the thousands. After everything I’ve done, I know what I’m capable of—and it’s far more than what I ever did on Dantooine,” he snaps. Vrook looks truly startled, gaze flickering between Revan and Alek.

“At least neither of us hold unchanging opinions of people we formed when they were five years old,” Revan adds, falsely cheerful. “Now if you’ll excuse us, Alek and I have an army to run, and I’m sure you have _something_ to attend to, unless you really do spend all your time looming over padawans and accusing them of anything you can think up.”

She turns on her heel and strides off towards Mireya.

“Let’s go,” she calls, but Mireya doesn’t move from her position. She is glaring at the Echani master with her arms crossed; Revan has never felt her so dissonant in the Force.

“You have no right to judge me,” she says to the woman. “All you’ve ever done is stand by and watch.”  
“Mireya—”

“Go kark yourself, Atris. I’m done with this.”

Anger and shock flood the woman’s pale face, but within a few seconds, her features smooth into an icy mask and she marches off in the other direction. Mireya turns to face Revan.

“I’m finished here,” she mutters. “Let’s go before someone else comes along.”

Revan has caused more conflict among the Jedi today than she has in years, and she is only too happy to leave the Temple and its false warmth behind. Mireya is quiet and withdrawn, Alek is annoyed, and Revan is reminded of exactly how much she hates Vrook and his hypocrisy.

He accuses Revan of pride that doesn’t come close to rivalling his own, of arrogance he has shown more times than she can count, of anger as though he didn’t spend years screaming at her for misbehavior. He dares to judge her for her knighthood; he thinks he has the right to stand in front of Alek and say that he is all wasted potential.

 _You know what he’ll try to do to us if we go back after the war,_ Alek says as they board a shuttle bound for the _Basilisk_. Though his face has not shifted, his shoulders are tight with a mix of worry and anger.

 _Of course I do. He’s been trying to get me thrown out of the Order for years._ No, Revan has no illusions about what it will mean to return to Dantooine when the war is won. Mireya has her place here in the Temple after all of this is over; she will be welcomed home as a knight and a hero. Alek and Revan will not. And even if they do go home (and when has it changed from _when_ to _if?)_ what will they be among Jedi who have never seen war? When they stand in each other’s blind spots as automatically as breathing, when they constantly scan for any hint of enemies or weapons, when they never have to talk aloud to communicate, what will they become to people who have spent their entire lives away from conflict?

And what will Revan have to answer for when she has broken the Jedi Code time and time again? She has gone so far beyond the pale that she knows if a single one of the Council knew, she would be thrown out if she was lucky. She sacrificed thousands to save Alek, and their shades may linger in her dreams but she would do it again without question or hesitation.

No matter where she goes, she will never shake this war and what it has done to her. That is a certainty.

Mireya is shining. Her Force signature glows with happiness, and her white and pale brown robes are neatly pressed and perfectly clean. Even the hilt of her pike has been polished and buffed until it glints in the lights of the _Basilisk._ She looks like a true Jedi as she strides through the doors of the viewing deck and down along the path laid out for her. Across the room, standing before the massive transparisteel window, Revan extends a hand and beckons her forward.

Her walk is sure as she moves towards Revan through the wide corridor formed by the Jedi and officers gathered here to witness her knighthood. She shows no hesitation and no fear as she comes to a halt scant feet before Revan and Alek.

“Kneel,” Alek commands, and Mireya drops to her knees. Revan ignites her oldest lightsaber and holds it at Mireya’s neck. She knows her part; she lets silence fall, and then she begins to speak.

“Mireya Surik, you have completed your padawan training and passed your Trials of Knighthood,” she says. Her low voice echoes off durasteel walls. “There is nothing more that you may learn as a padawan, and so I ask you this: do you swear to serve the ideals of the Jedi Order?”

“I do,” Mireya answers.

“I ask you again: do you swear to serve the Galactic Republic and to protect all who dwell within it?”

“I do.”

“I ask you a third time: do you swear to fight the temptations of the Dark Side and to resist its pull wherever you may find it?”

“I do.”

“Then I name you Jedi Knight, Mireya Surik. Your time as a padawan is finished. Rise a full member of the Jedi Order.”

With one swift motion, Revan slices the padawan braid from Mireya’s neck and sheaths her lightsaber at her hip. She stands in a fluid motion and bows to Revan and Alek, who return the gesture.

“I thank you for this honor, and I swear to serve to the best of my ability.”

“Welcome to knighthood, Mireya. I think a celebration is in order.”

Mireya grins and darts off to join a cluster of Jedi.

The party will last long into the night. Revan’s people have few outlets now, and even one evening of carefree happiness will do them well. Mireya deserves a chance to celebrate becoming a knight. Revan is glad for her, but that doesn’t mean she has any plans to linger for longer than she has to. She will leave Mireya and Alek and the rest to their fun.

Though Mireya is distracted, Alek manages to catch Revan before she escapes. His unerring ability to thwart her plans both amuses and frustrates her, and she sighs as he nudges her shoulder with one hand.

“I didn’t think you’d be this quick to flee,” he says, grinning faintly. The hand not resting on her shoulder clutches a glass of something blue and suspicious.

_I don’t like parties._

_No, you never have. Still, the kid’s only going to get knighted once. You might as well enjoy it._

“Should I stand behind you menacingly while you’re cheating the rest of the crew in sabacc or would you just like me to pretend that I’m capable of drinking something with this mask on?”

“Yes, actually, that would be wonderful. Your presence adds an air of credibility, which I wouldn’t need if you didn’t accuse me very publicly of cheating at any available opportunity.”

“You do cheat!”

“Yes, but not that much.”

Revan shakes her head fondly, and Alek’s face softens. He glances behind him briefly, then leans down and presses his forehead to Revan’s mask.

_Fine, go sleep. I’ll hold the ship together._

_Liar. You’re going to get drunk and pass out in a fountain,_ Revan retorts.

“That was _once._ And it was on Coruscant. Where exactly would I find a fountain on this ship?”

“You’re clever enough to come up with something. Now go make sure my favorite subordinate doesn’t die before she turns nineteen, please.” Revan shoves Alek in Mireya’s direction and waves as insolently as she can. He rolls his eyes.

“I think I’m supposed to be your favorite.”

“You barely qualify as a subordinate.”

Alek is still smiling when he disappears on a search for either Mireya or a sabacc table, and Revan feels unreasonably light as she returns to her quarters in peace. That is the consequence of staying so close to someone who understands her too well. Alek knows how to distract her or jolt her out of whatever reverie she has fallen into, and she only notices after it’s been done.

Unfortunately, she cannot afford that distraction now. If she isn’t going to stick around and vouch for Alek’s nonexistent morals in sabacc, she might as well get some work done. In one corner of her room, a small holocomm and a glowing display light up the room; Revan crosses to these and keys up the display, narrowing her eyes to examine its angles. Though the project is far from finished, it has begun to take its final shape, and Revan is pleased with the results.

The Mass Shadow Generator will be a weapon like no other. Revan slides into a chair, opens the datapad containing its files, and begins to work.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which Revan makes a bad decision, makes a slightly better decision, discovers the consequences of the first one, and get into multiple arguments with Vrook Lamar. This came out way longer than I intended because several extra scenes snuck their way in but here we are. Enjoy, because there's one chapter between this and Malachor and I will not be holding back when I get there.  
> For those of you wondering what the deal is with Mireya and Atris, Atris acted as a mentor to her when she was still in the Temple and they were fairly close until Atris refused to fight and Mireya went to join Revan.  
> (Also while writing this I was joking that Cassus Fett genuinely likes Revan and has a lot of respect for her as a commander and Revan just absolutely hates his guts and that really makes this whole chapter a little funnier.)


	9. Ambit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _The Force is warning her—she has to win. This is her destiny. This is what she was born for. This is what she has been working for her entire life. Everything has led to this._   
>  _Everything has led to Malachor_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ambit (n): a sphere of action, expression, or influence.

_Come to me,_ the Force had whispered to Revan, and she had answered. On the furthest edge of the galaxy, one of the final inhabited planets before the end of the universe as Revan knows it, she had found what the Force called her towards.

Revan stares up at the black nothingness of the temple and tries to remember how to breathe. No Jedi building rises up before her; this is old, older than any of the settlements on Malachor, and it seethes with darkness. It is Sith— _true_ Sith, not the fallen Jedi who pretend at being them. Revan had thought their monuments were all destroyed, razed by the Jedi a thousand years ago. This bone-white megalith proves that theory wrong.

Revan should be returning to her base. She has been gone almost a day now, and this deep within the tunnels beneath the surface of Malachor, anything could go wrong. Only her frequent comms—and more frequent mental conversations with Alek, who has refused to rely solely on comms and has instead taken up residence semi-permanently inside her head—keep the entire base from panicking over such an absence. She should certainly not prolong her delay in order to go poking around within a thousand-year-old Sith ruin.

The Force is strong within it, though, and as Revan stands before its sealed gates, the call that led her to Malachor begs her to step within them. She wavers there on the threshold; thousands of feet of rock and dirt hang above and below her, and for a split-second eternity, she almost steps onto the gravel-flecked path that leads to the temple’s doors.

But Revan learned enough from Dantooine that she can resist the pull of the Dark Side in this place. Its strength is ancient and achingly patient, but it will not snare Revan. Not today, not now.

The rest of the tunnels have proved mostly fruitless. Revan has found evidence of a civilization long since turned to dust, but few buildings and fewer artifacts survive in this deep darkness. Revan had hoped to locate something—a weapon, a holocron, anything to help against the Mandalorians—but so far, she has only acquired several small tears in her robes and a deep scratch along the paint of her mask. She has managed to make a holomap of several tunnels, and that information will be useful to the base, but other than that she has only gained brief alleviation from her boredom.

The journey back to the surface is far quicker than her descent. Revan and the probe droid she took with her know the way, so clambering through piles of rubble and leaping from shadowed ledge to shadowed ledge prove simple. Eventually, Revan finds her way back to the half-buried lift that got her down into the tunnels in the first place, and from there, she only has to wait a few minutes for it to bring her back up.

When Revan steps out of the cliff face that conceals the tunnels’ entrance, the camp outside is bustling with harried activity. Technicians race from temporary buildings to the labs they’ve set up against the cliffs, and Republic soldiers in uniform stroll in groups through the open spaces between structures. A few Jedi are scattered throughout; a dueling ring has been set up near one edge of the base, and several have gathered there to watch two spinning figures cross lightsabers. No one on the base gives her more than a second glance as she slips from the shadows and makes her way towards an outbuilding settled near the labs.

A few weeks ago, when this base was first constructed, Revan had claimed a spot against the cliffs for her operations hub, and just as she suspected, Alek’s Force signature places him within it. Revan doesn’t even have to open the door to sense that he is aware of her presence. He doesn’t bother turning around as she enters, just sighs and types a few more lines into the report he’s compiling—Huttese, intelligence disguised as trade discussions.

“Planning on disappearing again, or have you had your fill of tunnels?” he asks flatly as she peers over his shoulder.

“You’re using the wrong possessive pronoun in the third line,” she says. “And you know as well as I that someone had to do it.”

“ _Someone_ doesn’t have to be you all the time, Revan!” he snaps, finally turning to face her. “You vanished in the middle of the night. Some of us were worried.”

“I was in contact the whole time. You know I wasn’t in danger, Alek.”

“This isn’t Dantooine! You had absolutely no idea what was down there and all you took was a probe droid and your lightsabers.”

Does Alek really think she’s that incapable of taking care of herself? This isn’t Mimban or the mission that gave her a concussion and her breastplate. Empty tunnels provide little more danger than Malachor’s verdant surface. Revan barely encountered stray wildlife, and that is no challenge to her.

“And what would you have had me do?” she challenges. “Sit back and watch a group of Force-blind soldiers walk into the dark while I’m in the camp doing nothing? There is nothing to command, Alek. Not right now. All we’re doing is sitting and waiting.”

Three years ago, Alek would have backed down, even if he didn’t agree with her. But as Revan meets his eyes, she sees nothing but opposition.

“Your job. I would have had you do your _job_ , Revan. Everything you’ve done in the past two years has been for duty. Right now, none of us can afford for you to forget that. We are _this_ close to a victory that only you can hand us. You think our army doesn’t notice when you disappear?”

Images flash before Revan’s eyes—Alek’s perspective, wary faces and hesitant phrases and trepidation practically chaining these people in the Force.

 _Do you understand now?_ he asks. _They follow you. Not the Republic, certainly not me. You. You can’t do this to them. To any of us._

Revan almost argues on principle; she hates being wrong and hates having Alek _know_ that she’s wrong, but she cannot debate what he’s said. She has to acquiesce with a note of apology, though she doesn’t pretend to feign ignorance about the undercurrent of worry she can feel within his thoughts.

“I won’t do it again,” she promises. “Satisfied?”

He isn’t, but they both recognize that that’s all the resolution that will come of this.

“One of the techs asked for you a few hours ago,” he says wearily, waving a hand towards the makeshift labs. “Apparently there’s some new development you need to look at. I’d suggest you get that taken care of before you have to leave.”  
The impending rendezvous with a subsection fleet command is part of what Revan was trying to avoid by disappearing into the tunnels below the base. She works well with _her_ command team, not some upjumped officers who haven’t done half of what she has with a decade more time. She has no desire to spend any more time with them than is strictly necessary. Unfortunately for Revan, Chancellor Cressa doesn’t see it that way. He has ordered her to meet with a selection of the highest-ranking generals and admirals to present her plan for the Mandalorians’ destruction, and she has yet to come up with a good enough excuse to get out of it. She maintains that she can give a perfectly adequate briefing from the comfort of her own ship or this base, but an order from the Supreme Chancellor is an order from the Supreme Chancellor. She has to go.

“I’ll take a look at it. Did anything else come up while I was gone?” Revan asks absently, tossing her cloak over the back of a nearby chair.

“Yes. Here are all the requisition forms you requested, and _here_ are those reports you wanted to see. Have a good time with them.” Alek dumps a stack of datapads into her arms with ease; the weight is enough that Revan staggers just a bit.

“Is this some form of payback?” she asks around the topmost datapads. The expression Alek shoots her is so blankly annoyed that Revan is actually impressed.

 _What possible reason could I have for wanting payback, Revan?_ Alek has become exceptional at mental sarcasm. _You’re the Supreme Commander. You know what’s best. Who am I to criticize your increasingly dangerous decisions?_

_That’s hardly fair!_

“You could have _died._ Who exactly do you think would have been dragging your body from whatever pile of rubble finally killed you? A probe droid has no defensive capabilities. No shielding. No weaponry. Nothing. You went down into thousand-year-old tunnels without a Sith-damned _safety line,_ Revan. Do you think that your forces can afford that kind of carelessness? That I can afford it?”

“There’s nothing you can do about it now,” Revan snaps. “I’m back. I’m safe. My army isn’t in imminent danger of collapse. I don’t need to be lectured on caution like I’m some padawan!”

“Then act like it. We’re closer to ending this war then we ever have been, and you of all people should know we can’t jeopardize it by throwing you into danger whenever you feel like it.”

“I wasn’t _in_ danger, Alek. I’m not—”

“You’re not what? Last I checked, you’re still human. You’re still mortal. Gods, Revan, you’re not a myth yet, and I’d like to keep you alive until we’re off this rock.”

Beneath Alek’s hot anger is a current of something that flashes by too quickly for Revan to name. He won’t stay mad at her—he never does, not after arguments like these—but if Revan stays, she’ll only end up escalating the fight. Instead, she just turns on her heel and storms out, and only when she is halfway down the path that leads to the labs does she realize that she left her cloak behind.

Sithspit.

Luckily, no one gives her an unusual look when she strides through the doors to the labs and dumps the stack of datapads on an empty table. Mireya is already present, blonde hair tied back and braided through with tiny braids, sleeves pushed up past her freckled forearms. She looks up and gives Revan a terse smile, then murmurs something to the zabrak standing next to her.

“You’re back,” she says after the zabrak says something in reply, then pushes off the table she is leaning against and beckons Revan over. “I told Alek that we had something for you once you got up to the surface again. There was a breakthrough; take a look at this.”

Mireya keys open a portable holo and slides the puck towards Revan as it flickers on. The shape that appears—an engine heavy with machinery and displays, glowing red labels floating around it—is familiar to Revan after all this time. She has spent hours bent over the Mass Shadow Generator in an attempt to fine-tune it with the help of these techs, and as she gazes at it now, she can sense that it is all but finished.

“What have you uncovered?” Revan asks, enlarging the display with a flick of her wrist. The zabrak gestures to the newest area of the weapon, taps something in front of him, and brings up a flashing display.

“We were having issues figuring out how to make the generator work without tearing itself to pieces in the simulations we ran, and I managed to isolate the cause of the problem. Watch. General, if you want to do the honors?” The tech looks at Mireya, who nods and accepts the datapad he hands her.

“Here’s the latest simulation we ran,” Mireya says absently, fingers flying over the datapad. “If patterns hold, the generator is almost completely finished. Within the next couple of months, it’ll be done and you can carry out your plan.”

She hits one last button and the generator shrinks until the entire surface of Malachor hangs suspended over the table. A pale blue shadow expands out into space, radiating from one tiny point on the planet’s surface, and one by one, the unnamed ships placed in orbit begin to sink and crumble. Cracks spread across Malachor’s surface, deepen until the planet’s fault lines begin to fracture, until Malachor itself is torn apart under the weight of its own mass shadow. Only then does Mireya turn off the simulation.

Revan is condemning this planet to save the galaxy. She knows that with a steady, sickening certainty. Her plan is reliant on the Mass Shadow Generator. She is in far too deep to back out now; she knew what she was getting into the first time she opened a comm and called the labs and asked them for a weapon that would make the Mandalorians tremble. But that price is something she is willing to pay if it means that the Republic will be free again.

“Good,” she says at last, and hopes that the mask’s vocabulator hides the way her voice almost shakes. “You have all done well. I want this done within two months. The war is ending, and this weapon will hand us our victory.”

Not a single person in this room has seen her face besides Mireya. None of them know what species she is, let alone what she looks like beneath the mask and robes and the cloak she left a building away. She is not human to them, just as Revan is not a name.

And so when Mireya catches her gaze through the mask’s black visor, when the girl’s blue-green eyes meet Revan’s, Revan does not flinch. She simply says her farewells to the team and leaves the building behind, straight-spined and unbending, and she does not look back at her third-in-command. There is no time for second-guessing now.

There is no time for anything but moving forward and praying that the Force does not condemn her too harshly for what she is about to do.

By the time Captain Passik sets a transport down in the middle of the base, Revan has finished her work and is ready to go. The quicker she speaks with Cressa’s people, the quicker she can return here and go over plans with a command team that knows what they’re doing. She hasn’t given out orders without Alek or Mireya at her side for enough time that their absence—especially Alek’s, Alek who gives commands as well as she does, who might as well have her rank for all the weight that his orders carry—will unsettle her. She likes Passik, but a starfighter captain is not a replacement for her two Jedi.

Alek is waiting near the shuttle when Revan approaches, looking to all the world as though he’d rather be anywhere else. If Revan wasn’t inside his head, she might believe the bored expression on his face, but as it is, she just telegraphs a faint apology for earlier and nudges him out of the way so she can peer inside the shuttle.

 _Thought you’d still be hiding in command, not seeing me off,_ Revan says, raising a hand in greeting to Passik. The twi’lek salutes her, one hand closed around a mug of caf.

_A unified front, isn’t that what you always want to show the troops?_

_You’re very bad at staying angry with me._

_I’m still mad at you,_ Alek protests, though a tired smile pulls at the corners of his mouth. Revan snorts.

 _Yes, yes, we can get back to fighting after I get back, Squint._ It’s been almost two years since she last used that nickname, enough that a faint wave of surprise washed with warmth crosses the bond.

_I’m holding you to that._

_Good; no one else around here knows how to spar._

Alek doesn’t reply, just shakes his head and grins.

“Commander, shuttle’s ready if you plan on leaving at some point today,” Passik calls from inside the ship. She sounds impatient enough that Revan raises a hand in farewell and climbs aboard without further mental arguments, though she does send the strict promise of a sparring ring towards Alek as the doors slide shut behind her. She slings her bag into the empty seat opposite her and straps in; the ship shudders as Passik engages takeoff, red hands flying over the controls.

“Destination, Raxus Prime,” she calls from the cockpit. The shuttle lifts through the air—lower atmosphere, upper, and the faint shell of the exosphere until at last they reach empty outer space. Passik swings a lever, the stars blur, and hyperspace opens up before them.

Revan hasn’t made it three steps onto the _Reaper Moon_ , the space station orbiting Raxus Prime, before she decides that she can’t stand the officers in command here. Admiral Shiren Marq is the worst of the lot, a middle-aged man who drips contempt like sweat and makes her wish for the beskar breastplate she left behind in her quarters on Malachor. A woman with a ratlike sneer is perpetually at his elbow, and Revan would dislike her just as much if she wasn’t so insufferably narrow-minded and far beneath Revan’s attention. Two generals are the second and third people to meet Revan—a pair of twins with identical white eyes, identical dark skin, and identical expressions of cool curiosity. Revan knows their names and is marginally impressed, as much as she ever is with people who don’t serve under her. The rest of the station crew, however, is less than ideal. None of them have worked with her before, and it is clear that they don’t entirely know what to expect.

Revan’s task here is supposed to be simple. She has a plan, and she is supposed to present it. An ordinary task. If the Supreme Chancellor and his top officials could listen and accept it, so can a jumped-up admiral and a few other officers. It shouldn’t matter that Revan’s command crew is absent or that Admiral Marq calls Passik—one of the greatest starfighter pilots in the galaxy, a woman who has served Revan since the beginning of the war, who has twice his brains and ten times his skill—sweetheart when she asks where the briefing rooms are.

A presentation like this should take a few hours at the most, but looking at this collection, she has a feeling that it will take far longer. Three more admirals are due to show up before the station’s night cycle begins, and Revan has heard that a few other generals and commanders are due in. Given the selection she has already faced, she does not have high hopes for any of them. Alright, maybe Marq is the only truly inept one she’s seen so far, but _still._ He technically commands this station, and thus the stain of his incompetence touches anyone aboard the _Reaper Moon._

At least Passik laughs when Revan, well out of earshot, curses them out in Sy Bisti.

Revan holes up in her assigned quarters the minute she is given the chance. The excuse she gives is that she needs to make sure that her presentation and report are both ready for tomorrow; the truth is that she wants to be alone. Oh, she does get some work done, does review her report and check over every last detail of her plans for the fifth time, but she has already memorized everything she will say tomorrow. Instead, she turns to other reports, to the Mandalorians waiting in the Outer Rim and in Wild Space. Somewhere out there, mandalore the Ultimate is commanding his armies even in their dying hour. Somewhere, Cassus Fett’s gold beskar is preparing for battle.

Revan will kill them both. She will set her traps and lay in wait and they will come because she is daring them, and when they reach Malachor she will bleed them out.

Revan will not come back from this war a Jedi. She has known that since Cathar, since she and Alek took their places in command of a ship and a fleet and an army. She will pay that price, too, if it means that the Force will not be split asunder beneath the weight of so much death. She will pay whatever price the galaxy asks of her as long as it endures.

Revan may not be a Jedi, but she is their savior, and she is their martyr.

It is with that assurance that at last she falls asleep as the Force takes her.

Mireya is standing in front of Revan. The world is shadow around them, but Revan can see her almost-padawan as clear as day, skin pale and hair hanging loose around a face so haggard that it makes Revan afraid. Mireya looks so utterly _hollow_ as she stares at Revan, as she raises her eyes and looks past the mask straight into Revan’s soul and weeps.

“You did this, Revan,” she whispers. Blood flecks her lips, and her fingers are shaking as she raises them to her throat, as her Force signature _screams_ , as she falls to her knees and lets her lightsaber roll from her fingers.

Revan can’t talk, and she wants to reach out, wants to ask so badly what did this to a child, but Mireya’s face is full of condemnation and she feels so utterly wrong in the Force that Revan is almost sick with it.

 _I’m sorry,_ she wants to say, though she doesn’t know what she’s apologizing for, what she has done to a girl who has followed her for three years—

And Mireya raises her gaze once more and summons all that fractured pain surrounding her, lets it wash over them both, or maybe it is _Revan_ holding on except that it isn’t.

“I will never follow you again,” the empty place inside Mireya says through her mouth, and Revan breaks, and the Force is a tempest of death in her ears, and this is the price of her failure, this is what will happen if Revan loses the war, this is Revan’s weakness, this is Revan undone—

 _I want to fight,_ says a sixteen-year-old padawan, blonde hair a halo around her freckled face, and _you did this,_ says her nineteen-year-old ghost, says the ghosts of the Jedi Revan has led to their deaths, says the man who bleeds out with a beskar spear in his chest as Cassus Fett looks her in the eyes and gives her a victory coated in the blood of innocents, and _you did this,_ screams the planets Revan crushed—Lantillies and Ketaris and Eres III and Onderon and Dxun, Malachor which Revan has condemned to eternity.

And Revan becomes that death, lets it sink inside her bones and fill her until she cannot breathe through the taste of blood and ash, and then she _screams._

She is still screaming when she wakes up, lightsabers crossed in front of her, utterly alone in her room aboard the space station. In those first few floating seconds, she expects a familiar hand on her shoulder, expects Alek’s quiet words and the warmth of him at her side, until she remembers that he’s a system away and she can feel nothing but the faint suggestion of his presence through the bond.

When she glances at her chrono, it blinks out an hour that tells her she would never get back to sleep even if she wanted to. She heaves out a shuddering sigh and lets her lightsabers tumble onto the bed, then stretches out a hand and calls her mask from its place a few feet away. She would have slept in it if it wouldn’t have made her so uncomfortable; its security is as necessary as air in this place.

(Revan hasn’t taken her mask off around anyone but Alek in months. She needs it to face the world, to face her army and all its blood-soaked wake, to look the Supreme Chancellor in the face and tell him that her sacrifices are necessary. What does it say about her, that not even her third-in-command has seen her bare skin since Dxun, that only Alek—Alek, who is _hers,_ who is as much a part of her as she is of him, who has held her in the dark and made her human again when she was nothing but the sum of her defeats, who stands at her side as though he was born to be there—really knows who she is behind black and red beskar?

She doesn’t know. She doesn’t want to.)

By the time she pulls her black robes on and fastens her cloak over her shoulders, the chrono has ticked by enough that though she will be early when she exits her room, she will not be wandering a dead station. Though a few officers shoot her strange looks to see her striding around their station this early in the morning, they largely leave her alone. Revan doesn’t mind being unapproachable; she is their leader, not one of them, and she has never liked mingling with all her troops and their black-and-white understanding of how her powers work.

She passes the next few hours in a training room on one of the upper levels of the station. Though it is nothing like the training salles that the Jedi use, Revan can still appreciate the way her knuckles and heels crack against heavy punching bags, and there is enough open space for her to run through the basic katas of Ataru and Juyo; though she favors Jar’Kai, the fourth and seventh lightsaber forms were the basis of her training for years. Revan took to the aggressive movements of Ataru like a quadduck to water even as a child, despite the dismay of many of the masters, and Master Arren began to teach her Juyo’s lightning-fast stances almost immediately after she was made a padawan. Now, Revan flows between the three of them as easily as breathing.

By the time the scheduled briefing draws near, Revan has grown tired enough of lightsaber forms that she is almost glad to bring her report and proposal before the assembled figures. The plan is simple enough in theory, as Revan explains. She has set her trap at Malachor and will set the full might of her fleet within its orbit as she slowly drives the Mandalorians towards the Outer Rim. Now that Mandalore has lost Dxun, he has few enough retreats outside the galaxy’s outermost layer. It is the responsibility of these admirals and generals to uproot said retreats and ensure that Mandalore has nowhere else to run. That bit of that plan was Cressa’s idea; he claimed that Revan was far too necessary to the effort around Malachor to go chasing ghosts, and Revan begrudgingly agreed. Mandalore will not hold his remaining planets very hard; he is conserving his strength for the final attack. He must know that Revan is planning something, and thus he will be watching her and her movements more than anything else.

The presentation is… _fine._ Admiral Marq refrains from making some inane comment while Revan lays it out, and if she pauses at a place where Alek or Mireya might step in to explain another part of the plan, no one notices except Passik, who has been watching her too closely since she came aboard the station. Not for the first time, Revan wonders how much her captain has picked out about her and her command team.

Of course, Marq’s rat-faced aide asks her a question so stupid she debates demoting Marq himself right there just to get her out of the room, and only the white-eyed twin generals divert Revan’s thoughts away from her increasingly detailed plans to redo every part of the command structure not directly under her authority. On any other day, she would simply stop thinking so much, but if she pauses, her dream will be tattooed inside her eyelids, Mireya’s pale face and the way she had damned Revan and the Force’s death all around her.

Revan hasn’t gone a week without a vision for months, but this one was different—no green light, no shadow on the bridge of the _Basilisk_ watching Revan lose the war, but that same destruction that she has tasted more times than she can count. The Force is warning her—she has to win. This is her destiny. This is what she was born for. This is what she has been working for her entire life. Everything has led to this.

Everything has led to Malachor.

She spends another night in the tedium of the _Reaper Moon_ before her briefing is approved and Cressa gives her the all-clear to return to her actual station. Though she is quiet on the way back, Passik fills the silence with her own commentary (she also accuses Revan of missing working with her own second and third too much to form an unbiased opinion, which is absurd; Revan can function perfectly fine without Alek and Mireya, she just doesn’t like to). Still, despite the captain’s companionship, Revan is glad to see Malachor’s green surface after hours in hyperspace.  
“Home, sweet home,” Passik says dryly as the shuttle sets down on the base’s landing pad. “Gods, I’m not going to miss this place when we leave.”  
Revan hums an agreement and jumps from the shuttle as soon as she can. Passik doesn’t know what will happen to Malachor; no one besides the techs and Revan’s triumvirate do. Utmost secrecy for this project is necessary—and Revan doesn’t know how some of her officers would react if she told them what she is about to do.

The sacrifice is necessary. That doesn’t mean that the galaxy will understand that fact.

In general, Revan no longer spars within the view of her troops. She prefers privacy, likes not having her every move analyzed by a dozen sets of eyes at the minimum. Right now, she doesn’t quite trust herself if she doesn’t have that many eyes on her. In public, she does not second-guess herself. In public, there are no doubts. In public, the other Jedi watch the lines of her body and see only a leader, a legend.

Across the ring, Alek bows. Revan mirrors the gesture and draws her lightsabers; her feet settle into her favorite opening stance as the blades ignite in twin bursts of heat crossed before her face. For a moment, they simply stare at each other, unmoving, and then Alek slips through three katas of Djem So and is on her in a second. There is _strength_ behind his blow, enough that Revan has to step back or risk losing her balance, and she senses a twinge of satisfaction from his side of the bond as she shifts.

That satisfaction doesn’t last long. Revan knows how to counter his attacks, even the more aggressive forms he has begun to practice lately, and her size is to her advantage. Two blows to his unprotected side and her second saber swinging at his knees pushes him back across the ring, and Revan doesn’t give him time to recover before she lashes out with both lightsabers and strikes in a quick one-two that he barely manages to block.

 _I taught you Juyo, Alek; I doubt it’s going to be very effective against me,_ she taunts, and if they weren’t being watched by every Jedi in camp, she knows he would be rolling his eyes.

 _You act like I don’t know how to counter you,_ he answers, and as if to prove his point, he redirects another volley of her blows right back at her. A twist of his hand and the Force hits her in a wave; Revan barely manages to land on her feet, and she responds with a two-handed blow as she kicks at one of his legs. Predictably, that fails to set Alek back for long.

These days, their duels almost always end up in draws if they stick to lightsaber combat. Oh, they wear each other out just fine, but actually _winning_ is something else entirely. Alek will disarm Revan and Revan will simply lunge at him and start a brawl, or Revan will take his lightsaber and he’ll simply take the Force into his hands and fight with that. Bound as they are by the rules of the ring they are currently in, they cannot resort to tricks like that—apparently, the sight of their Supreme Commander and her second tussling like children in the dirt does not inspire the troops to any great extent.

Revan gets lucky this round. As she and Alek exchange another round of blows, his guard slips—and Revan takes the opening as fast as she can, sliding in close and shutting off a saber just in time to send his own blue blade angling past her. He curses as she moves in, but he can’t recover fast enough; Revan pulls the saber hilt up and ignites it an inch from his neck, freezing him in place.

 _I thought you knew how to counter me,_ Revan says with as much amusement as she can pass across the bond.

“Bastard,” he murmurs, then raises his voice. “I yield.”

Revan steps back, satisfied, to the cheers of the other Jedi.

“Your Supreme Commander is the victor!” she cries, spreading her arms wide. She will put on a show here, just for a few minutes. Let them have their fun.

 _You owe me for that,_ Alek’s voice says inside her skull.

 _You love me too much for revenge,_ she retorts.

A deep sigh. _Yes, Force help me, I do._

Behind the mask, Revan grins. In this ring, with Alek standing beside her and her Revanchists cheering her victory, the war is so far away. She can be Revan Adarii and not _Revan._ For five minutes, she can stop thinking about the sacrifices she will have to make when the fleet comes to orbit Malachor.

And so she lets the Revanchists’ praise wash over her, lets herself feel their joy and their acclaim bright like candles in the Force, lets herself touch the beating heart of Malachor, as above her head its single moon stares down at her like the eye of a long-dead god.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hate most of this chapter and it took me way, way too long to write, but it's what y'all are getting, so here. Malachor part 1 is next and it is going to be capital-P Painful, so obviously I'm very excited for that. This also means that the fic is very close to being done; it's a weird feeling to know that I've almost finished multiple installments in a series for the first time.  
> Anyway, enjoy what is basically an entire chapter of absolute nonsense with the occasional good line. Yes, Revan is absolutely in a terrible mood because her entire command team didn't come with her. Yes, that "temple" (not a temple, not that Revan knows that) is going to come back a bit later. Yes, I hate myself for making Revan think that all her visions are warnings of what is going to happen if she loses and not promises of what Malachor will be.  
> Enjoy! Feel free to leave a comment if you so desire, and if any of you want to shout into the void about Revan, the Old Republic, or Star Wars in general, my tumblr is also ipreferfiction.


	10. Syzygy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Pain mingles with anger in her veins and she lets it, lets the nameless screams of this war’s billions of victims eat into her bones until she becomes them, becomes nothing but a whisper on the wind and a name her people and the Mandalorians alike murmur in the shadows. She is wrath, and she is_ Revan, _and Mandalore the Ultimate could never hope to stand a chance against her._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Syzygy (n): a conjunction or opposition of celestial bodies.

Revan hasn’t stopped swearing for ten minutes by the time she drops out of hyperspace and sees the _Basilisk_ hanging suspended before her. A quick comm to the bridge and the hangar doors slide open; Revan barely gets her shuttle under enough control to prevent herself from becoming a flaming wreck as it sparks along the floor of the hangar bay.

Neither her second nor her third are waiting for her when she jumps from the shuttle. No, Alek is holding her fleet together from the bridge and Mireya is down on the green surface of Malachor awaiting an order that Revan won’t give for hours. Facing her fleet, Mandalore’s own has been steadily creeping closer, and the battle is heating up. She knows that she has lost ships and troops in the thousands already, and comparing them with the losses she incurred at Dxun and Onderon, those numbers will only climb as the hours wear on.

The _Basilisk_ is alive as Revan moves through it. She settles her nerves as she walks—black boots, black robes, beskar breastplate and the mask she’s worn for three years now, dark cloak flowing behind her, and now she looks like the legend she knows the army sees her as.

And when the doors to the bridge fall open and she steps onto the familiar metal expanse of its humming floor, her people salute her as one.

 _You’re back,_ Alek says from his place in front of the viewport, and doesn’t wait for a response before he’s pushing snapshots of the battle towards her almost faster than she can rationalize them. Even as the images and displays flash behind her eyes, her mind is pulling forward enough strategies that she can bark a sharp order at one officer even before she’s reached her usual position on the bridge.

“Mandalorian scouts,” she says by way of an explanation. On any other battle, she’d offer a joke about the sheer number of shuttles she’s requisitioned and destroyed, but Mandalore hangs too heavily over her now. One of them is going to die today, she knows this. Malachor will be the bitter end.

It just won’t be hers.

“Karath is pushing them from space,” Alek says absently as he scans the display of the battle. _And you’ve got your admirals in place on the inside. Passik has been going after them since the battle began, too._

“Good. Has he taken the bait?” Revan asks, then sends a set of orders to a weapons tech who receives them with a nod.

“No way to tell this early. He’s hitting the command ships, but he hasn’t moved his ships into position. He’s well outside the weapon’s range.”

 _The weapon._ That’s what they call it these days. It doesn’t need another name, not when Revan has watched it break apart Malachor a hundred times in simulations.

How many hours until she surrenders her soul for a future where the Force is not torn apart? Until she finds out what it means to win a war by killing how many tens of thousands? Until she finds out what today will make her when it strips her of every part of her that is still a Jedi?

It doesn’t matter if the battle is lost before she can unleash the weapon. She turns back to the steadily reddening display of the battle and fits her strategies to the ships—the pawns—under her command.

Tomorrow, she will be sorry. Today, she sends them to their deaths and doesn’t flinch, and she ignores the hesitation she feels from Alek as she gives the orders. He knows that she will win this battle, and he knows that the cost will be high. She will get no argument from him right now.

Time does not flow smoothly in battle. Revan can pass an hour before she blinks or spend almost that time giving orders only for the chrono to read merely a few minutes later. The full weight of that liminality, that place where time and space are elastic, seeps into Revan’s bones as ships burn around her. Numbness has taken up its place in Revan’s chest; she has divorced herself from the Force howling beneath her skin, inside her mind, around her as she feels the Revanchists burn (the few that remain, loyal and mortal and dying, dying like they never would have if they had stayed back and obeyed the High Council and not signed away their lives for Revan).

(Hundreds of Jedi have died for Revan since she took the _Basilisk_ and a rank and handed them the keys to the end of the war, so what are a few more now, when Malachor will burn brighter than they ever could?)

An explosion rocks the space outside the _Basilisk_ and one of the officers looks up grimly.

“We just lost a capital ship, sir,” he reports, and Revan watches as it turns red on her display. Though it is the first major casualty since Revan joined the battle, it will not be the last—Mandalore is all but Revan’s equal, a better strategist than most of the Republic put together. With Cassus Fett at his side—and Revan knows Fett survived Onderon, has known it for months, and it does nothing to stoke the flames of hatred licking at her ribs when she thinks of the choice and his plan and the white towers of Iziz bombed into rubble—he will give Revan the hardest fight she’s had since the war began.

 _Adjust its escort to fortify the most damaged ships,_ Revan says to Alek, and the order is out of his mouth before she’s even finished giving it. She doesn’t have time to speak, though her officers know the words come from her. The battle is moving almost faster than she can follow it; as large as this fleet is, the moment she addresses one weakness five more take its place. Her only comfort is that Mandalore will be doing the same thing somewhere in the belly of his flagship as Revan burns his people out of the sky.

Ships move, and troops die, and Revan stands with her feet on the _Basilisk’s_ durasteel walkway and commands it all. Her consciousness has stretched over the battlefield almost of its own will—the Force is stronger here than Revan has felt it in months, as though it wants her to feel the corners of this conflict, the sheer _numbers_ she commands and kills and sacrifices.

And for a moment, staring out at Malachor, she half-remembers a scene like this, a flash of green light, a voice laughing inside her skull, the horror as the Force itself was torn to pieces, but what does it matter now? She will win at Malachor, and with it she will win the war.

 _Remember this,_ the Force does not speak into her ear, and she shoves it aside. This is the turning point of the war, and she doesn’t need warnings of a wave of death that will never come.

Alek glances at her and she shakes her head just slightly. _It’s nothing,_ she tells him, half words and half impressions. They have bigger things to focus on.

It takes everything Revan has in her to connect the lines of this battle when she looks at them. Everywhere she turns, Mandalore has a new threat—he’s testing her defenses along the far edge of the fleet, sharply poking at her starfighters near the planet, attacking in full force from the front as a smaller force hammers her from behind. She doesn’t allow herself to feel the cold, sharp fear creeping up her spine and stiffening her muscles, doesn’t even pause between throwing out orders and plotting the next line of movement. Attack and defense blur until she doesn’t know which is which, until Mandalore’s fleet begins to blend with her own and every opening she takes is another drop of blood she is drawing from Mandalore’s flesh.

Revan is winning this battle. She realizes it with a sharp inhale as a starfighter goes up in silent flames and sets off an explosion that rips through a Mandalorian cruiser. She pauses, watches the Mandalorians be driven back meter by meter—and icy dread shoots through her at their retreat.

“Mandalore isn’t with his flagship,” she says, and repeats it when Alek frowns at her. “He wouldn’t be losing like this. There are openings out there that should have crippled ships and he just let them go by. He isn’t leading this battle anymore.”

“Isn’t that a good thing?” asks one of Revan’s top officers, a transfer from Saul Karath’s ship after half her command crew died over Dxun. She barely spares the woman a glance.

“Not if he’s on Malachor. He was here at the beginning, I know that. If he’s abandoned his flagship in the middle of this battle, then he has something planned.”

Whispers have started up on the bridge. Mandalore isn’t mortal to her crew any more than she herself is; they are both of them masks at the heads of their respective armies, avatars of terror and destruction. The Republic fears Mandalore, and rightly; even Revan hesitates at the sound of his name.

 _Te Ani'la Mand'alor._ Mandalore the Ultimate, their warlord and leader, who made the Republic tremble to its living core. He would be the greatest legend on this battlefield if Revan and her stolen mask and twin lightsabers weren’t leading an armada against him.

The bridge’s holoterminal rings with an incoming transmission before Revan can make a decision. She answers it with a gesture only to find Mireya, lightsaber pike ignited and crossed before her, blood streaking down her face. She isn’t in the lab where Revan left her, and that alone is enough to set off alarms.

“What’s going on down there?” Revan demands.

 _“Fett. Revan, Fett is_ here. _He knows where I am and he’s coming for me. He’s already sent a scouting force and it was enough to take out our defenses. It—kark!”_ She cuts off and dodges a blaster bolt that comes flying past Revan to burst on the wall behind her. _“It won’t be long before he reaches me, and I can’t hold him off. I need reinforcements. Please, Revan.”_

Fett. Cassus Fett is on Malachor too, and how could Revan not have seen it? Mandalore and his top commander in one place, down among Malachor’s green fields hunting for her base.

“I have to find him,” she says into the noise of the bridge. Alek and her nearest officers turn to stare at her as the voices die down.

“Now? Sir, we’re winning, but barely. If you leave now, the Mandalorians will crush us!” The protest comes from the same woman who first spoke, Commodore Yenio, who has apprehension in her face as Revan turns to face her.

“Fett and Mandalore both need to die, commodore,” Revan snaps. “And none of the Revanchists stand a chance against them. My third-in-command’s life is at stake.”

And none of them need to know how deeply her vendetta against Cassus Fett runs. None of them have even dreamed of what she did on Onderon, on Dxun, the thousands of lives she handed over to him to save one person—to save _Alek._ She will kill him for that. She will break Mandalore before his army and shatter his fleet and send his people running to the farthest edges of the galaxy, but Fett will die first today.

“Does the general have the bridge, then?” a captain asks from before the weapons displays, his sharp eyes tracking targets even as he speaks.

 _You’re not going down there alone._ Alek doesn’t look at her when he says it, but his mental voice is as serious as she’s ever heard it.

_I need you here. I’ve—_

_You haven’t even faced Fett, let alone Mandalore. Give Admiral Karath command; we’re winning the battle. You can spare me._

“Fine. Alek goes with me. Someone comm Admiral Karath and tell him he’s got command of the fleet while I’m chasing down Mandalore,” Revan orders, and stares down anyone who looks like they’re about to protest.

“Sir, I’d like it to be known that I disagree with this course of action,” Yenio states, low and angry, quiet enough that Revan and Alek are the only ones who can hear her clearly. Revan stops dead and whips around to face her, irritation surging beneath her skin.

“Unless you wish to be court-martialed for disobeying a direct order from your Supreme Commander, then you will listen to me and start taking your orders from Saul Karath. Am I understood, Commodore Yenio?” she snaps, voice cold as the void of deep space.

The commodore’s face flashes, but she steps back and gives Revan a stiff salute and a quiet _understood._

“Prepare a shuttle to depart for Malachor’s surface,” Revan calls to one officer. They give a nod of assent, and for what will be the final time before Mandalore dies, she stares out the thick transparisteel of the bridge’s viewport.

Revan will be victorious. She has to be.

Cassus Fett has more than a few scouting parties on Malachor’s surface. The shuttle’s scanners light up an area large enough for a full camp near a section of disused buildings that Revan left a skeleton crew to monitor when she took most of her troops off the planet’s surface. Every one of them is dead now, she’s sure, more bodies to add to those who have died in Revan’s name. She’ll say her piece about them when this battle is over. That is a certainty. But they don’t matter when Fett is _here,_ when she can finish what she started on Onderon months ago.

She doesn’t have to speak to Alek when their shuttle hits the ground. He falls into place at her shoulder, lightsaber drawn, and Revan can sense a low hum of anger beneath his skin that matches the fury igniting her veins. Today marks the end of _everything,_ and Revan is ready for it.

She tears through Mandalorians like training dummies on the _Basilisk._ Their armor is nothing when her lightsabers find the weak points, when she and Alek are fighting back to back and the world narrows down to the way they fight in tandem, to three lightsabers and the strikes Revan can predict long before they occur.

They are standing in a circle of bodies when two noises on opposite ends of Fett’s makeshift camp hit Revan’s ears at once. From the forest, several sets of armored boots, a force either sent for reinforcement or hidden until now. And from the run-down building, the sound of a door sliding open, a flash of golden _beskar’gam_ , and _Cassus Fett_ is standing in the doorway, beskar spear clutched in a metal hand glinting with the same gold as the plates of armor.

“You,” Revan snarls, and behind his helmet, Fett laughs.

“I knew you’d come to face me sooner or later,” he says. “I thought it would be alone.”

 _I’ll hold them off,_ Alek tells her silently, and she doesn’t need to look at his face to sense his resolve.

She doesn’t answer, just hurls a wave of pure energy at Fett, sends him sprawling into the building, leaps after him as she calls her sabers to her hands and ignites them. The door slams shut as she goes colliding through the doorway and she doesn’t care, can’t think about anything beyond the undiluted _wrath_ in her blood and Fett’s bloody smile and Iziz, Dxun, Alek unconscious on the ground.

Fett isn’t alone, but the five warriors who flank him mean nothing. Revan will kill them one by one and it won’t matter except to bring her closer to Fett’s cooling body.

“You know, I expected you to take longer when you chose to condemn thousands of people just to save your Jedi,” Fett says too lightly, metal fingers clenching around the shaft of his spear. “And you didn’t even try to save his troops, either; oh we counted all the bodies you left. A full company, all two hundred of them, except the Jedi who led them. They can’t have all been dead when you dragged him from the mud.”

The Force is a roar in her ears and she’s on Onderon and Fett’s dark, dark eyes are telling her to make a choice, to choose who to save, and Revan lets all that fear and anger take over, lets it flood through her, and she is _screaming_ without making a sound.

She doesn’t feel the Mandalorians die when she throws her hands out. She has tasted too much death to register five more bodies as they crumple to the ground, puppets with their strings cut. She can taste fear for the first time, just a touch of it, around Fett when he slams the end of the spear against the ground and sets his feet in a ready stance.

“ _Ad be a’den,_ ” he says with a tone akin to awe. “This is where it ends, Revan. Fight, and one of us will die a true warrior today.”

Cassus Fett faces his death like any Mandalorian Revan has ever met, and Revan could almost respect him for that if not for the fire beneath her ribs.

“It won’t be me,” she answers, and she’s moving faster than Fett can block her. The spear turns red-hot beneath her lightsabers, and beneath the blue and gold, Revan can almost see through his helmet’s visor. She wants to, in that moment. She wants to see him _afraid._ She wants to make him human again before she kills him.

Onderon was nothing compared to the nameless power Revan calls to her fingertips as she breaks away and circles for another strike. This—this is the Force’s warning in her ears and the battle up above and everything she has lost to Fett, more fuel on the fire as she feints high and swings beneath the spear’s heavy arch. Her sabers skate off Fett’s beskar legplates but the power behind them is enough to make him stumble, and that is an opportunity Revan will not let slip through her fingers. She spins, hooks an ankle around his leg, _pulls_ until he’s tripping, and when he throws out an arm to right himself she swings for it.

It isn’t beskar, and metal will still melt under her lightsabers. It might not cause him pain, but that loss will be enough to unbalance him again. Revan is sure of this, until the tip of the blades hit it, one after another, and both flicker out before she can blink.

Revan hesitates, and it’s enough for the spear to slam into her breastplate hard enough to bruise. She reignites her blades and raises them in time to block the following blow, but it’s not quite enough to recover.

“Cortosis-weave,” Fett says. “I’d rather not lose this arm again, and it’s good for keeping you _jetiise_ on your toes.”

Revan kicks him in the chest in lieu of a reply. He laughs at that, the way she’s heard Mandalorians do in the thick of a fight. A surge of fury rises at the sound; she throws out a hand and sends him into the crumbling wall hard enough that she hears a sharp crack.

Not Fett’s spine, unfortunately, just a pipe in the wall. Revan grits her teeth and launches another salvo of blows towards his head. The first few glance off his bracers, until he manages to get an arm under him and a foot on Revan’s chest and she goes flying back, rolling into a crouch and bringing her blades back up.

Fett is the one to attack next, spinning the spear in a flurry so fast it becomes a silvered blur until it strikes towards Revan’s boots and head, the second motion coming within a heartbeat of the first. She barely manages to block the one aimed at her head with one forearm, and _kriff,_ it hurts enough that she fears something is broken for the few seconds afterwards.

But the pain is meaningless. She takes its sharp edge and knits it together with the burning edge of fury in her veins and it’s _enough,_ enough to push her forward and dig her boots into the duracrete floor and send one saber flying across the room to where Fett has taken up another steady position. He deflects it easily enough, but Revan is already in midair when it comes back to her, and this time his spear can’t hold her full weight when she comes colliding squarely onto it. Fett’s foot slips and Revan takes all that momentum and strikes at his hand, the flesh hand still covered in golden armor. His grip on the spear loosens as the last ringing note of pure beskar fades from the air; Revan slams the hilt of one lightsaber into his fingers and _wrenches_ with the other hand, pulling the spear out of his grip and leaving only metal and cortosis between her and Fett’s defeat.

She is throwing a punch at it before she recognizes what a bad decision that is, and the Force is enough to at least dent the metal when she reels back as pain blooms across her knuckles. All that overpowering rage has begun to abate, and Revan is left with the numbness that overtakes her in the heat of the worst battles. Her body is working without her brain as she searches out Fett’s weaknesses, the ones she never had to find on Onderon.

“Out of every fight I’ve had, you’re the best,” Fett says, and _there._ As he swings the spear, there is an opening where the metal arm leaves a hole in his defenses.

Revan shoves away the attack and bares her teeth behind the mask.

“Good,” she snaps. “Because they aren’t going to be the ones who kill you.”

Fett is still laughing when he makes another attack and Revan strikes, ducking low, letting one lightsaber extinguish, bringing the other up as she jabs sharply at the flesh hand and reaches out with the Force to _crush_ with the other, shattering metal hard enough to make Fett grimace, and then the spear is tumbling out of his hand and Revan kicks it away before he can reach for it again.

Slowly, very slowly, Fett reaches up his hands to remove his helmet. One of Revan’s lightsabers is poised at his throat, the other ignited again and held at her side, and his face is solemn as he bares it and throws the golden helmet to the ground. This time, when he looks at her, blood doesn’t coat his temple or his teeth.

“Well met, _verd,_ ” he says, and it is a gesture of Mandalorian respect as he gives her a single nod. If Revan weren’t wearing the mask, she’d spit at his feet.

“This is where you end, Fett.” She pours as much anger as she can into those words as blue and gold lights ignite the hollow of his throat.

“Then I die with honor,” he says. No fear, only an almost religious certainty.

“You have no honor,” Revan spits at him. That makes him smile, a flash of white teeth against dark skin.

“Then at least I die a Mandalorian,” he answers, and those words echo with an age-old promise that Revan cannot understand. She doesn’t try to, just flicks her wrist and drags the point of her lightsaber sideways.

Cassus Fett’s body hits the ground, and with that dull thud, it’s over.

It’s over. It’s over, and Cassus Fett is dead, and it doesn’t bring back the people Revan left to die for Alek or the thousands she broke against Fett’s defenses over the course of the war.

It’s over, and it brings Revan no peace when she looks down at Fett’s gold beskar and dark skin and the spear glinting in the shadows. She only slightly sways against the wall as she leaves the body on the ground, keys open the door, and steps back into the dappled sunlight of Malachor.

A body is resting against the building’s outer wall when Revan takes her first trembling step back onto the dirt. A Mandalorian without his helmet, head hanging at an unnatural angle, and for a moment Revan doesn’t understand how he could have died until she raises her head and sees Alek standing in the clearing, chest heaving, lightsaber clenched tight in a white-knuckled grip, and there is _fear_ staining the bond when she reaches for him.

“Rev,” he breathes, and Revan’s hands are on his arms even as his knees buckle.

 _What happened?_ she murmurs. Alek’s eyes won’t focus on her, won’t even look at her—Force, his presence is tangled like Revan has never felt it.

And half the bodies around him have been killed not with a lightsaber but with the Force, their spines snapped or their armor crushed around them. At least it isn’t how Revan has killed, the sheer waves of _death_ she unleashed on Fett’s guards, but taking a life with only the Force leaves a mark. Revan found that out after Eres III, but it was never supposed to touch Alek. Revan might not be a true Jedi anymore—hasn’t been a Jedi since the first time she killed instead of taking that Vizsla commander prisoner with a padawan’s body lying at her feet, since she sacrificed Cassus Fett’s defeat for Alek’s life—but Alek has always been a better Jedi than she ever was.

 _I don’t know,_ he finally answers. _I was angry, and I had to keep them out—I had to keep you safe. What have I done?_

 _Alek._ “Alek,” she repeats, this time aloud, “look at me,” and he finally does. Revan might barely be holding herself together, might have her sanity hanging on by a thread, but she can ground him. And if her hands are shaking as she lifts them to the buckles of her mask and slides it off, he doesn’t notice or doesn’t mention it.

It’s the same gesture they’ve done a thousand times, before and after battles or in dark corners of the _Basilisk,_ in any second of peace. Revan leans in and rests her forehead against his, lets the Force wrap itself around them until they aren’t two people anymore. She can’t tell him that it’s going to be alright when she woke up for months after Eres choking back nausea, but she can push as much reassurance as she can towards him until at least he can _breathe,_ until he finally sighs and whispers a thanks so soft she can barely hear it.

“We need to find Mandalore,” he murmurs. For half a moment, he presses his lips to hers, and there is _aching_ along the bond when he pulls away. He’s right; Fett might have been Revan’s primary target, but Mandalore cannot leave this planet alive either.

“Will you be alright?” Revan asks as she pulls him to his feet, and he nods.

“For now. After the battle’s over? Who knows.” He laughs a little at that, a hollow noise. Revan twines her fingers with his long enough to give him a little more comfort as she fits the mask back on and buckles it in place.

“We’ll have all the time in the world then,” she answers, and prays it’s true.

Mandalore could be anywhere on Malachor by now. Fett was the one looking for Mireya and her team, not him, so Revan can’t even pin him down that way. A quick comm to Mireya assures Revan that she’s alright and that no more Mandalorian forces have attacked her position. Revan doubts that Mandalore would want anything with her anyway.

It doesn’t take long after that for her comm to ring again, this time from the _Basilisk’s_ bridge.

 _“Sir? We’ve, uh, got a transmission. Transferring to your comm now.”_ It’s one of the communication techs, face pale as she speaks. Revan understands that fear when a full-body display appears in place of the tech’s head.

 _“Revan,”_ says Mandalore the Ultimate, hands clasped behind his back and feet set in a warrior’s stance.

“What do you want, Mandalore?” Revan doesn’t snap the words, but her voice is sharp with all the rage of this war.

 _“I assume that Cassus Fett is dead now, if you are not,”_ he answers. _“I will not lie that his death is a blow to us, as you well knew.”_

“You haven’t sent me a transmission to ask about your top commander.”

_“I have not. You, Revan, are the greatest of our adversaries. I have come to challenge you in the way of every ancestor who has come before me. A duel to the death, as Mandalores have done for ages past. You and I, and let this war end with one death instead of thousands more.”_

And Revan wants so strongly to bring up Cathar and the sea of bones, but Mandalore hasn’t moved since he first appeared. He expects an answer, and Revan will give him one.

“I accept,” she says, and ignores the sharp burst of surprise as Alek whirls around to stare at her.

 _What the hells are you doing?_ he demands. Revan doesn’t answer beyond a minute shake of her head.

 _“I am sending you the coordinates now. Bring whatever people you wish, so long as they shall not interfere.”_ He gives her a solemn nod and vanishes—as he does, another light marks an incoming transmission, coordinates close enough that Revan can take her shuttle and meet him within the hour.

He’ll have sent the transmission to as many of her ships as he could. They all saw her accept that duel, just as the Mandalorians did. Even if she wanted to back down, she can’t, not now.

“Revan. You can’t be serious,” Alek says, disbelieving.

“What other choice did I have?” she answers tersely. “I can end the war. I’m not going to pass that opportunity up.”

“You know they won’t stop fighting after Mandalore is dead.”

“They’ll honor his defeat. It’ll be enough.” It _has_ to be enough.

“They might honor his defeat if he’s the one to lose. Are you sure that it’ll be him who dies?”

It _stings_ to have Alek look at her and doubt after everything, after these three years of war, but—

“No,” Revan admits softly. “But I have to try. You know that, Alek.”

And he nods, though she can feel he doesn’t want to.

“Come on,” he says, a little quieter than before. “The shuttle’s waiting. We can’t afford to delay.”

Revan can feel the shatterpoint in this moment; she needs to say _something,_ anything, to tell him that she isn’t going to die. She needs him to understand. She needs him to know that she’s never going to leave his side. A little desperately, she says, “Alek—“

“I know,” he answers before she can finish. The ghost of a smile crosses his face before it settles back into the blank mask he’s become so adept at wearing. The moment is gone, and all Revan can do is nod around the words choking her throat.

 _Then let’s go,_ she says, and takes off in the direction of the shuttle, Alek at her back.

Revan is expecting a Mandalorian camp when her shuttle touches down and she leaps from its open side to hit the hard-packed earth. But besides the clusters of Mandalorians and equipment, no signs speak to a long-standing presence. Mandalore has found neutral territory for this duel.

A Mandalorian custom, more likely than not, but one Revan is grateful for. Neither of them will have the advantage of familiarity on this rough terrain, and Revan can play that to her advantage. Mandalore will be like no enemy she has ever faced, and she will need everything in her arsenal if she wants to properly win this duel.

The Mandalorians part as one when Revan comes striding towards them, Alek just behind her. Where she has only her second, Mandalore has brought two dozen at least, and the crowd that closes behind Revan as she walks between them feels uncomfortably heavy. All these eyes, even behind their masks and helmets—they overwhelm her, these people who see her as a different sort of legend. How many of their kin has she killed? How many clans here have been bloodied by her lightsabers and have in turn come to watch her die upon the blade of their _Mand’alor?_

“Revan,” says a dead man, and Mandalore the Ultimate steps forward as Revan breaks into an open circle.

In three long years of war, this is the first that they have ever come face-to-face. Mandalore is tall, taller than Alek in his _beskar’gam,_ and with the red cloak that swirls around his legs, with the tattered red robes hanging from his belt, he reminds Revan of a statue of some ancient king consigned to the anonymity of the grave.

Fitting. By the time the sun sets on Malachor for the final time, Mandalore will be dead, and Revan will have won the war.

In the end, there is little ceremony before the duel begins. Revan makes Alek swear that he will not interfere—though she can feel the lie in his words—and discards her cloak with its ragged edges. She hadn’t bothered with Cassus Fett (had been too angry to do more than attack and pray she survived) but Mandalore is different. Mandalore is a rival where Fett was an enemy.

If Revan looks up, she can see the nearest ships in both their fleets. The sky is lit up with the lights of a thousand dying vessels, and in the flickering green and red and blue, Revan steps into a flat circle of dirt and stares out through the visor of her mask as Mandalore does the same. A Mando’a phrase, something low and melodic, slips out from behind his mask.

“Let the best warrior win,” he says, this time in Basic, and Revan lets Malachor’s dark earth support her as she draws her lightsabers and ignites them.

She has dreamed of this day for three years. Billions have died in this war, all in the name of Mandalorian conquest, and Revan will avenge them.

Revan has to avenge them, or this war will mean nothing.

Jar’Kai comes to her as easy as breathing, two stances before she’s even across the clearing and another as she aims a blow towards Mandalore’s head, a blow he blocks as a shimmering _ring_ echoes out from his beskar blade. Juyo, Ataru, all the motions of her childhood, all the katas she practiced at for hours until her arms were shaking and sweat had stuck her hair to her spine—and Mandalore matches almost every movement. Blade against blades, he meets her, a steady rain of beskar that has her dodging before he can strike her. He has strength enough behind his blows that if one of them catches her, it’ll do more damage than she can afford; she has to use her size to her advantage, to dodge when she should be striking.

It costs her. Mandalore gains ground where he shouldn’t, and while Revan is spinning circles around him, her lightsabers do little damage. If she drops her guard enough to attack, she’ll leave too large an opening, and that beskar blade will slip right through her defenses. Against an opponent who has been fighting Jedi for more than a decade, that mistake would cost her dearly.

Revan miscalculates. Mandalore skates a handful of single-handed blows off her lightsabers and she’s too busy blocking them to watch the other hand, to catch the line that shoots from his gauntlet and wraps around her ankle, yanking her off her feet. Even in midair, she’s turning, slicing the line with her lightsabers crossed, and she lands on her feet, but it’s not quite enough to stop the punch that slams into the front of her mask and knocks her back.

 _Kriff,_ it hurts, and the way her vision is blurring isn’t a good sign. She tastes metal, realizes she bit the inside of her cheek; the pain is enough to focus on, enough that she manages to swing out of the way of the next stroke of Mandalore’s sword. She is still swallowing blood when she stands, but her head is a little clearer.

“You’re going to have to try harder than that to kill a Jedi,” she says, and watches the way Mandalore’s legs settle into a stance half a second before the blade moves.

Mandalore doesn’t laugh, but the fury of his blows lessens for a heartbeat.

“I’ve killed enough of your kind to know that’s not true,” he replies. Revan sees the knife almost too late; its edge is bright as molten mercury as Mandalore’s fist drives it straight through the weakest point of her cobbled-together armor, right beside the beskar and through black fabric into flesh.

Pain _explodes_ from that first point of contact. Revan’s breath punches out of her lungs; she staggers back as the knife slides out again, and it’s all she can do to stay upright and clamp down on her shields. Even through them, she feels Alek’s fear as sharp as steel—she snaps a frantic _no_ across the bond before he does anything more than take one aborted step towards the ring.

Chest heaving, she lifts her lightsabers and wraps the Force around her hands, her arms. She will _not_ tremble here in this ring before the man who made the galaxy shake. She will not let him see her falter, not when her blood is spilling out across her stolen beskar, not when her head is still spinning and the only thing keeping her upright is the burning of her muscles.

“Nice trick,” she snarls. “It won’t save you.”

Mandalore feels almost _amused_ as that knife spins around in his gloved fingers, its edge dripping red. This time, he doesn’t answer her, just hammers his blade into her lightsabers once, twice, three times, until her side is burning and all her injuries from the duel with Cassus Fett ache with sheer exertion. She isn’t strong enough to hold up, not even with the Force a second cloak around her. She needs to get Mandalore off her.

And the next time he strikes, so does she. One blade is extended, all the force she can spare behind it, and as Mandalore drives the beskar sword two-handed into her defenses, she lets the other flicker out, does the same with it as she did with Cassus Fett, as she’s done a hundred other times. Mandalore’s blade locks with hers and Revan tamps down on the fear she wants to feel, brings her other hand up, and ignites the saber in a sharp motion that sends the tip straight into Mandalore’s shoulder, burning a hole through one edge of his cloak. He reels back from the heat of the lightsaber, and it’s enough for Revan to lash out, pull her other blade from the lock, and strike a two-sabered blow straight to his chestpiece.

He leans back, and Revan gathers all her determination and _slams_ into him with the Force and her fists and the blue and gold lightsabers in her hands. It’s enough for his feet to slip, enough to send him back, and Revan is eating up all the ground she lost in the early stages of the duel even as her breastplate is growing slick with blood and her side is chilled every time the rapidly-changing wind hits it.

She will not lose. She will not lose to this nameless warlord who _dares_ to say he deserves the Republic. Revan has made herself a legend, a martyr, a faceless mask to defeat Mandalore, and _she will not lose._

Mandalore may be trained in hand-to-hand, may know how to use his knife and that sword, but he is nothing against twin lightsabers, against the Order’s youngest Jar’kai master, against _Revan._ She killed Cassus Fett, and she’ll kill him too. Revan will let his lifeblood soak into this soil until the galaxy has slaked its thirst of vengeance, and when it’s done, she will take that mask and raze the Mandalorians until they could never _hope_ to rise against the Republic as long as Revan’s name is anything more than a faded legend.

Pain mingles with anger in her veins and she lets it, lets the nameless screams of this war’s billions of victims eat into her bones until she becomes them, becomes nothing but a whisper on the wind and a name her people and the Mandalorians alike murmur in the shadows. She is wrath, and she is _Revan,_ and Mandalore the Ultimate could never hope to stand a chance against her.

Blade against blade, plasma hissing as beskar meets it, and Revan pours her fury into her blows until her lightsabers are nothing but blurs of blue and gold, until Mandalore’s sword is moving as fast as he can swing it and still losing ground. Once, when she gets close enough, he lashes out with his knife again; Revan catches it and sends it spinning across the circle, its edges still flecked with her blood. The pain in her side is growing worse the longer she fights, and she knows when she misses an opening and doesn’t recognize it until it’s closed that Mandalore’s blow to her head is still affecting her, but the injuries mean nothing beyond more fuel to the inferno burning in her chest. In these moments Revan hates Mandalore more than she has ever hated anyone save for Cassus Fett; that inscrutable mask is a taunt to a victory just out of her grasp.

Mandalore’s sword lashes out and catches Revan’s glove as she recovers from a round of attacks and it bites enough that she drops her offhand saber, and by the time she’s pulling it back into her hand she can barely get it up to block the sword bearing down on her.

And Revan does what she’s always done, what Mandalore can’t be used to, the move that has always caught her opponents off guard.

She lets Mandalore lean his full weight down on the sword.

The lightsabers flicker off.

And Revan spins out of his trajectory, watches as his momentum carries him too far forward, steps behind him as he whirls to face her even as he’s hitting the ground, but it’s not enough. Even as he’s turning, her sabers are igniting again, one sliding in along the side of his breastplate, the other cutting deep on the same wounded shoulder Revan nicked earlier, and she clenches her fist against the pain in her hand and _pushes_ until her opponent is on the ground, pierced through.

Only then does she extinguish her lightsabers for the final time. Mandalore’s breathing is growing labored, and the lightsabers went deep enough that Revan knows he won’t be rising again.

“Well met,” Mandalore murmurs, the same words Cassus Fett used before Revan sliced his throat open. Mandalorian words, not meant for this tongue, but Revan can recognize their significance nonetheless.

Her rage is still burning bright as she kneels at his side and hangs one saber on her belt, as she looks at the mask that has become her greatest foe and one of the few people alive who could understand her, no matter how much she loathes him.

The Mandalorians revere their ancestors, Revan knows this. She doesn’t recognize the Mando’a that Mandalore is chanting, but the repetition—it sounds like names, like a lineage.

“Go easy to your ancestors,” Revan murmurs, just loud enough for him to hear, and she brings up the hand still clutching a lightsaber hilt, presses it to a gap above his breastplate, and ignites it.

And _Te Ani’la Mand’alor_ dies.

The whispers have already begun when Revan stands, lightsaber still held loosely in her bloody fingers. She peers hazily through the darkened visor of her mask until she finds Alek and drops the shields she held so tightly during the duel.

 _See?_ she says, hoping her exhaustion isn’t too evident. _I told you I would win._

The sheer _relief_ she feels from him is enough to make her stagger—or that might be the still-bleeding hole in her side. Force, Mandalore got in some good hits before the end, and the full weight of both duels has started to hit her.

When she looks up again, Alek is far closer than she remembers, already reaching for her arm.

“We need to go,” he hisses; Revan realizes that the fear tinging the bond isn’t just for her. The Mandalorians are watching them now, staring between Revan and the body she just left, and she doesn’t like the way the Force is swirling around them now that Revan has just dropped their great leader in the dirt.

She nods vaguely and lets her assent flicker across the bond. The battle is still raging up ahead, and if Revan thought that the Mandalorians would break more easily when their leader died, she has changed her mind after seeing this crowd and the way it is beginning to move.

Luckily, their shuttle is in the same place as they left it—and undamaged. By the time Alek manages to land it in the main hangar bay of the _Basilisk_ (without so much as damaging it), Revan’s largest wounds are covered in kolto beneath her robes and the blood has been cleaned from her breastplate and mask. She looks like a leader and not a twenty-four-year-old Jedi who has just stumbled out of two duels with Mandalore the Ultimate and his top commander. She prays her officers can’t see the stiffness in her movements when she finally reaches the bridge of her flagship and takes back control of the battle.

All in all, their casualties are better than Revan expected; she sees several ships that she expected to lose still functioning, and a number of their smaller craft are busy swarming the edges of the Mandalorian fleet. In the scant few hours Revan was gone, they have managed to cling to their victory, though only barely. Revan underestimated the sheer fury and force the Mandalorians would unleash. They know this is the final battle of the war, and the news of Mandalore’s death will have spread to their fleet by now. No matter what orders she gives now, the Mandalorians are too intent on making her bleed for what she did.

Revan had hoped for a few short moments as she stood on Malachor’s surface that she might be able to avoid unleashing the weapon. Now, watching a Mandalorian cruiser go colliding into one of her own, she watches that hope slip away through her fingers.

The Mandalorians have pushed forward with enough force that they’re in range or will be soon. Revan knows that with a distant awareness as she watches more and more of her fleet go red. Her closest ships have drawn them in tight enough that Revan can destroy them.

She can end this war. She’s been planning it for months, down to the movements of every ship in her fleet. Drawing the Mandalorians to Malachor had taken weeks just by itself. She has known for months that if she doesn’t want a pyrrhic victory, she needs a weapon. She _has_ a weapon, and she has Mireya down on the surface of Malachor ready to unleash it.

Revan has woken up every night for the past two weeks dreaming of a wave of death so strong it almost undid her, and even if she can’t remember much in the waking hours, that much still clings to her. She knows the cost of hesitation now. She knows what will happen if she doesn’t win today.

“Get me General Surik on the holoterminal.” It’s a testament to her will that her voice doesn’t fluctuate as she talks, and her officers only take a few seconds to contact Mireya. If she’s using the knight’s official title, they know that this is serious.

 _“Revan,”_ Mireya says, serious as Revan has ever seen her as a full-body holo appears on the terminal.

“Is the Mandalorian fleet in range?”

Mireya turns to ask something to a figure just out of sight. For several seconds, there is silence, until she finally faces Revan again and shakes her head.

 _“Only about half their fleet’s in range. You need to draw them closer,”_ she says, absently running numbers on a datapad she’s clutching in one hand. Revan can see a scratch on her cheek from her earlier fight, and for a moment it’s all she can look at, that sharp, dark line among her third’s scattering of freckles.

Mireya is nineteen. Revan never should have brought her into this war, never should have given her a command. They shouldn’t be standing here, the two of them, at the edge of the universe as Revan condemns every value she swore to uphold.

But there is no time for doubt now. She glances at Mireya’s diagrams and the map she brings up to show Revan and directs her ships accordingly. The Mandalorians need to be pulled closer, and so Revan does just that—she sets traps they can’t resist, makes sacrifices she never would have made before, takes all the strategies she’s perfected and sets them to life here, moves them between thousands of ships and crews and ties a web around her entire fleet.

And the Mandalorians take her bait. She uses half her fleet to box them in on the side of Malachor, takes all her defenses and blocks their retreats. She uses everything she has to drag them within the spread of the weapon Mireya is projecting.

None of Revan’s officers or troops know what she’s about to unleash. None of them were privy to the earliest meetings, to the hours of simulations. Even Alek doesn’t know the full extent of it; this was Revan’s idea, hers and Mireya’s and the techs’.

Revan will not emerge from this a Jedi.

If it saves the galaxy, she doesn’t care.

“Are they in range?” she asks quietly, staring out of the viewport. Mireya pauses; something pops in the background, and her voice calls out a disgruntled negative to Revan’s question.

So Revan does what she does best: she stares out at the battlefield and plans. Even now, her ships are dying, and she can’t get the Mandalorians in range unless they have the incentive.

Alek gives her a look when she orders a capital ship to begin its drift towards the planet, but he doesn’t argue, just passes it on. He knows she has a plan; he’s watched her spin victories from odds nearly as bad as these before.

And when a section of the Mandalorian fleet descends even closer to the planet’s surface, when Revan looks out over so much debris and open space and sees it _click_ , she knows without asking that the time has come.

Revan turns to Mireya and nods, and the order in it is clear enough.

_It’s time._

Revan turns back to the viewport, hands clasped behind her back. Malachor hangs in front of her, its green surface almost hidden behind the shape of so many ships, Mandalorian and Republic alike; she knows how many of her own will die today, how many Jedi are aboard those ships.

Revanchists have done nothing but die for this entire war. What will a few more be against all this death?

The sun is setting over Malachor V for the final time as Mireya’s holo flickers out.

Revan is standing firm on the bridge of the _Basilisk_ when the Mass Shadow Generator is unleashed.

And it—

It is death transcendent, it is the bones of every life Revan has taken screaming in her ears, it is a planet cracking apart before her eyes until she can do nothing but breathe through it all, until she can’t even do _that,_ and she is drowning.

She is—

She is ten thousand lives all stacked on top of each other, and another ten, the lives on this planet, the civilians they couldn’t evacuate without arousing Mandalorian suspicion, people who _trusted her,_ people she swore to save, and she is every life she’s lost in this war, this war she swore she’d stop—

Green light is washing over her, eating up the darkness of the bridge, flashing across her and igniting all the black and red, and she would fall to her knees but she can’t move, can’t _breathe_ past the death, past the Force torn open around her, and _this._

This was its warning, this was every one of those nights Revan woke up screaming, this was _supposed to be her loss,_ she was supposed to stop this, she was _supposed to stop this—_

She is life torn asunder, she is a tidal wave of whispers, she is every voice that ever called her _butcher,_ a throbbing hum of noise that snakes inside her, cracks her ribs and chokes on her heart’s blood and ties itself into a knot in her throat, and what good is the mask when she thinks she might be screaming?

She is become death, and the Force whispers _you did this_ in her ear, and Malachor shatters and whole fleets are wiped out in an instant, in a minute, shapes burning in the atmosphere until they crash on blackened rock. Jedi are dying—she can _feel_ them, every one of them, all her loyal pawns, all winking out in an instant.

Something in the back of her skull _snaps_ and she can’t think past the taste of blood in her mouth, except she remembers Arren Kae on one of those ships, Arren Kae who followed her, her master, _dead._

And the Force is sundering with all the death Revan has unleashed, this tide of bone and blood and ash— _butcher, butcher,_ it’s all she’s ever been, and she killed a _planet—_

And it all comes crashing into her, a deluge she can't keep out until it's in her throat and stomach and _heart,_ until she _is_ that flood, until her veins are burning with the cold heat and all that light goes out and Revan— _Revan,_ her name is Revan, or is Revan a title, she doesn't know, can't think around the tens of thousands of lives that have ended out there and on her tongue and buried inside her chest—

 _You did this,_ echoes the Force, echoes every one of Revan’s sacrifices, _and you knew what you were doing._

It’s too much, but she cannot break now, not in front of the people who have spent three years calling her victories necessary when she handed up their compatriots to a Mandalorian death for half a chance at winning. Malachor is shattering, is broken already, and all Revan can do is will her legs to not give out as that tsunami crashes through her.

Unlike the planet, unlike the Mandalorians, it dies slowly, and by the time she remembers how to make her heart start beating again, the bridge is as silent as the void that Malachor has just become.

She turns like she turned away from Mireya to stare at them, at these ashen faces who swore their loyalty to her when she was a Jedi and not—not what’s left of her in the wake of what she’s just done.

“The war is over,” she says, so quiet the words barely make it through her mask.

The Mandalorians send their surrender not two minutes later.

The war is over. The war is over, and Revan has won, and she wonders how many Mandalorian ghosts are watching her now as their shattered fleet limps back into hyperspace, as they leave the broken wreckage of Malachor behind.

Two-thirds of Revan’s ships have gone down to join the wreckage below. Their crews, all those thousands who saluted Revan as she promised them the end of the war that would have torn the Republic apart—every one of them is dead. Malachor is not a place for survivors. She knows it in her bones.

“Sir?”

Revan doesn’t register that someone has spoken until Alek— _Alek,_ Force, something in his presence is still screaming—answers in her stead. Even then, her ears are ringing enough that she can barely pick out enough words to make sense of what the officer is saying.

Mireya. Mireya—survived, and her shuttle has reached the docking bay of the _Basilisk._ She made it off Malachor. Revan’s third is alive.

“I’m going to meet her,” she tries to say, only the words get caught in her throat. It’s Alek who repeats the statement, though his voice is as hoarse as she thinks hers would be. He hasn’t looked at her since the weapon went off _,_ for all that the shields between them have vanished, and when she reaches for him, he feels as hollow as the shattered field of planetoids beyond the transparisteel window.

Mireya Surik is alive. That’s enough to keep Revan upright through the long, cold halls of a ship that no longer feels like her home. Even as the doors to the hangar bay slide open, even as Revan catches that familiar flash of blonde hair and light robes, she clings to half a hope that she is alright.

Only when she reaches Mireya, this girl that Revan knighted mere months ago is holding herself up against the wall and _staring_ at her with empty eyes and a face as pale as bleached bone.

And her Force signature—

Mireya is Malachor writ small, that tidal wave of death, all those thousands of souls that Revan slaughtered. Her body is lost amidst the _void,_ a crushing, hollow place that eats anything that touches it. A wound, a living wound, and Revan can’t breathe until she slams her shields down so tightly she can’t feel her anymore.

Gods, what has she done? What has she _done,_ that Mireya—Mireya, the first Jedi to really follow her, who has fought beside her for three years, shared her victories and defeats, who has been her friend and padawan and compatriot—looks at her with such empty condemnation?

“You did this,” she says to Revan, and it is a ghost who speaks those words, a thousand voices rasping from her throat.

 _I’m sorry,_ Revan doesn’t say. _I never wanted it to end like this. I was trying to stop this._ She could say any number of things, and none of it would matter anymore. Malachor is gone, and Revan gave the order.

Mireya stares unblinking through Revan’s mask, sea-storm eyes so utterly blank that she hardly looks alive, and Revan—Revan _flinches_ from that gaze.

“I will never follow you again,” that void speaks in Mireya’s hoarse, soft voice, and this is an echo of a half-forgotten dream that Revan was supposed to _stop_ , but it’s far too late for regrets when the Force hasn’t stopped shuddering with the weight of all her deaths.

And just like that, it’s broken.

Revan is no longer a Jedi, and neither is Alek standing quiet at her side, but Mireya was supposed to be the one that could go back. She had her place at the Temple, her reassurance that of all of them, she could return and be welcomed or at least accepted. Mireya is _nineteen_ , barely a knight, barely anything but a girl who followed Revan to war for the sake of justice.

Mireya is nineteen, and Revan has just destroyed her.

She doesn’t speak again, just turns away from Revan and pushes away the man who came with her, one of the technicians whose face has become familiar to Revan over the past months. Revan would have called out for her earlier in the war, but now? Now, with a planet they both devastated, with Revan torn apart and Mireya nothing but a breathing emptiness, Revan lets her go.

She finds herself back on the bridge when the Force has receded further, minutes or hours later. The _Basilisk_ is still dark, and few people have remained; even Alek is gone, fled to his quarters or some darkened room. Revan is, for the first time since she gave the order, alone.

Revan is no Jedi. Under the flickering green of Malachor, she wonders what she will become in the stead of everything she has ever known.

When the sun rises over her again, what will she be?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mando’a:  
> Ad be a’den: child of wrath  
> Verd: soldier, warrior
> 
> Don't look at me, I also hate myself for posting this late. I spent a week procrastinating by talking about a different AU with a friend, and right as i got back into the swing of this, my laptop broke so I had to dig up my old one and get it functioning, causing another delay of several days. Oh, and it's finals week. So this is many days later than I intended, and I apologize for that.  
> On the other hand, y'all are really getting the angst today. I've been looking forward to writing this chapter since I began this fic, and though it's not the final chapter, it's arguably the most important.  
> Next chapter does have some fun bits, however. I'm very excited to get this beast finished so I can start work on the next one.

**Author's Note:**

> I know absolutely nothing about strategy, so we'll see how this goes.  
> This is the second part in a series, and though it can be read alone, it's best to read part one to understand all the references made here. Other than that, there isn't much to say besides enjoy! If you feel so inclined, feel free to leave a comment; I love getting feedback on my work, and it really means a lot.  
> Enjoy the slow descent to darkness. It's gonna be fun.


End file.
